How can I perfectly align a skeleton's "spine" across the X axis?

[kathal-2]

Update: I've found that this solution doesn't exactly work everywhere, so I made a new post.

Hey!

I'm trying to rig a character model. I've encountered two issues with the joints that make up this character's spine. The joints forming the spine aren't perfectly aligned at 0 on the global X axis, and whenever I attempt to mirror these joints, the spine is duplicated.

How can I alleviate this? I've attached the .ma file!

[kathal-2]

I found a solution!

All I had to do was and adjust the joint orient here:

And the spine is now perfectly straight!

 

However, the spine still appears to be duplicated:

 

Is this the norm when working in Maya?

[stephenkmann · Accepted solution]

you want to select the joints you want to mirror. not the entire skeleton from it's root. 

If you select the root, and tell it to duplicate/mirror.. it's going to duplicate it. 

try instead to select just the shoulder joint, and mirror just that joint. 

hth

-=s