Seasonal distractions are slowing down and I am again able to focus on the tiger. I've been trying to animate him using the mixer and am experiencing difficulty. The reason I want to use the mixer is because the tiger needs to be carefully timed around the canary's actions and if I were to keyframe in the standard way, I'd be moving a lot key frames around so this seems like a good job for the mixer.

I've hit the same problem I had in September when storing and applying poses on the Moose - if a joint is straight when you store the pose, the bone will flip and bend backwards. I'm trying to keep the joints with a slight bend. Today I discovered there is a special command for skeleton poses that's in the skeleton menu. Create > Skeleton > Store/Apply skeleton pose, using this command may avoid the problem previously mentioned. I haven't tried it yet.

Originally I had been selecting the tiger model in branch mode and storing the pose (using the Actions > Store > Transformations command) .. this is not what you want to do ... it takes all the SRT values from every bone and chain and messes up the IK result.... I changed to selecting the effectors and controllers (the upvector objects, the hip cube, shoulder cube and whole tiger cube). This works much better, and is probably what I'll continue using as I am storing animation / fcurves and not only poses (The Store/Apply Skeleton pose thing is for poses only not animation ... I may try a few tests with that now that I know about it. My original tests with poses were disastrous because of the above-mentioned issues!).

I also realized that if you use the Store > Animation command ONLY those objects selected that have animation on them will be stored. If you want Animation and transform values of unanimated objects (i.e. if you want your pose to be stored in addition to the animation) then you need to choose Store > Local Transformations - All Animation or Current Values.

Back to the tiger.