Before you can use the Characterization Tool to map the bones in your character's skeleton to the nodes understood by the HIK solver, you must set up your character in a basic T-stance that provides HIK with crucial information about the proportions of your character's skeleton and joint transformations.

Your character's T-stance must match the description and example given below as closely as possible in order for the inverse kinematics and retargeting solvers to produce accurate results for your character. Without a properly configured T-stance, the solvers will base all of their operations on faulty data, and will likely produce skewed, awkward or unexpected poses.

The T-stance has the following requirements:

• The character must face along the positive direction of the Z axis.
• The arms must be spread along the X-axis. The left arm should therefore be pointing along the positive direction of the X-axis.
• The top of the character's head must be up, in the positive direction of the Y-axis.
• The character's hands should be flat, palms facing the ground, with the thumbs parallel to the X axis.
• The character's feet can be perpendicular to the legs (with the toes pointing along the Z-axis as shown), or they can continue along the orientation of the legs (with the toes pointed straight down). The feet must not be rotated around the Y-axis (meaning the toes of the left foot should not point inward toward the right leg or outward away from the right leg).

A typical T-stance is shown in the following image: