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I think that you may be confusing your datatypes.

RVIZ takes in a pose with (x,y,z) position and (x,y,z,w) orientation. The orientation is represented by a quaternion. For a quick refresher on quaternions, check out the Wikipedia page.

Probably what is happening is that you are incorrectly publishing your quaternions.

If you have a given set of rotations, in roll/pitch/yaw, you can convert these to a quaternion using the tf::transformations::quaternion_from_euler function. By default it takes the euler angles in sxyz format (roll, pitch, then yaw).

For a bit of example code (in Python):

quat = tf.transformations.quaternion_from_euler(0,0,theta)
### Insert math into Odom msg so it can be published
odom_msg = Odometry()
odom_msg.pose.pose.orientation.x = quat[0]
odom_msg.pose.pose.orientation.y = quat[1]
odom_msg.pose.pose.orientation.z = quat[2]
odom_msg.pose.pose.orientation.w = quat[3]

This is for a differential drive robot, where there is no roll and pitch, and the kinematics are calculated shortly before this snippet of code.

So as an example:

 >>> tf.transformations.quaternion_from_euler(0,0,0)
 array([ 0.,  0.,  0.,  1.])
 >>> tf.transformations.quaternion_from_euler(0,0,math.pi/2)
 array([ 0.        ,  0.        ,  0.70710678,  0.70710678])
 >>> tf.transformations.quaternion_from_euler(0,0,2*math.pi)
 array([ -0.00000000e+00,   0.00000000e+00,   1.22460635e-16, -1.00000000e+00])

So, just keep in mind that all parts of the quaternion (x,y,z,w) have to be filled out, not just orientation.z.