three3dguy, you probably meant for that to go in a different thread...
OK, time has both made a liar out of me and confirmed that I need to do something different.
I rendered the frames in the other thread on October 19, which was 5 days ago. At that time, I tried opening and closing the car file to reset the solver or whatever in order to coax the batch renderer and scrubber to sync up and show the same thing. To prepare a trimmed version of my .car file, I naturally needed to open the file to delete shaders & stuff. However, before I deleted anything, scrubbing showed *exactly what the batch render did*! So no one can reproduce the discrepancy problem, even when using my original file. Not even me.
But it *does* confirm that I need to find some way of telling the solver which way to go. Instead of not being able to trust that the batch renderer will show the same thing as the scrubber, now I can't trust that the scrubber will solve IK deterministically.
> if you have the Driven plug-in
I don't. I need to research that.
> the graph editor, are you using that?
DEFINITELY! I don't think I'd try this without the graph editor. I became dependent on that kind of a tool when I wrote a similar program back in the '80s for my motion control system. I used it on several movies and commercials, and wouldn't have been able to make the deadlines without it.