The next step I take is to select one of the bones, and then switch the tool to Modify > Rotate > Rotate. This shows me the rotation rings on the bone, and I then use the up and down arrows to move back and forth through the bones in the object, looking for any funky, or weird looking rotational handles. In particular, I look for any rotations that are gimbal locked (as seen in the following image), or just weird and that would make rotating that bone difficult.

I don't bother too much with bones that are not animated at all, or bones that are only slightly incorrectly oriented. I also check out any bones that have had their orientation changed in Modeler using the bank handle, but have not been converted with this new orientation.

Once a funky looking bone is found, I use Setup > Modify > Orientation > Record Piv Rot to rotate the pivot point of the bone. This will snap the orientation of the bone to match the bone's direction, or corrects the orientation to match any tweaks made on the Skelegons.

After all bones are looking clean and tidy, I save the scene.

NOTE : This stage must be done BEFORE you animate as changing the pivot orientation of bones after animation will have drastic results.

Because I'm not using weightmaps to control the influence of bones in my object, I need to test the object and either tweak the bones properties such as rest length or strength, or add in extra stabilising bones. While this may sound like lots of work, I am always quite pleased with just how few of these tweaks I ever need to make with LightWave's bones.

I begin my deformation tweaking by selecting one of the bones, opening the Properties panel and setting the falloff Type to Inverse Distance ^128. Note that this setting is global, and it affects all the bones in the skeleton, no matter what bone you selected.

Falloff controls the way in which the influence of a bone will fade away as points get farther away from the bone. The higher this number, the more the bones influence stays close to the bone itself, and fades away quickly so not to pull other points around that are close by.

I begin testing areas of the model for deformation issues. Starting with rotating the neck bone, I test the head for issues. As you can see, the chin points are also being influenced and held by the chest bone. This is something we can fix with a couple of simple holding bones in the head, since the chin area has no bones of its own to help deform it, only relying on the bone at the back of the head.

I begin adding these hold bones into the head by selecting the head bone, and adding a child bone using Setup > Add > Child Bone. This bone appears attached to the end of the headbone, and is moved down to the same place as the headbone (along its Z axis) then keyframed in place. I then rotate it 90 degrees to point it out from the head, in the direction of the face.

The length of this bone is adjusted by selecting Properties > Rest Length. This option controls the actual length of a bone — Don't make the mistake of using the stretch tool as this simply scales the bone, and will cause it to drag the mesh along with it (however its great for stretchy animation effects!)

I perform another Setup > Add > Child Bone to add a child bone to the end of this bone, and rotate it to point down and set its rest length to fit inside the chin of the head. I then select both bones and Setup > Modify > Orientation > Record Bone Rest Position, which activates the bone, and also tells LightWave that this is the size and orientation of the bone when the object is not being deformed. This is often termed as being Rested, or Resting the bone.