Splitting your rig into a local deformation layer
Here's a quick solution to a problem that rears it's head when you try moving an object that's deforming really far from origin and the vertices start to jitter. There's a great discussion ongoing regarding this on CGtalk ( http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=1305633 ) This is caused due to the vertex transformations being stored as floats, so when you start moving really far from origin (since the mesh transform stays at origin and your deformers are moving the vertices) you start running into floating point precision errors. The Problem Autodesk has a solution, which is to basically allow your mesh to move with the root, that way the vertex transformations aren't being calculated from massive distances. This will cause double transformations of course, so you'll need to negate the roots transforms from the skincluster ( http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/SkinCluster-deformations-