Having Trouble with my Puppet

[Mgiordanovel]

Good Afternoon! I am having trouble with one of my puppets. I can't seem to figure out how to make parts dependent on others. When I try to attach an arm to the body, the origin is still coming from the middle. I am still new to Character Animator and am trying to teach myself so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You!

[alank99101739]

Could you post say the layer hierarchy for your puppet? Otherwise share the puppet so others can have a look? It is too hard to give advice without understanding what you have done so far.

[Mgiordanovel]

[Mgiordanovel]

Hope the image is big enough for you to see, thank you in advance!

[alank99101739]

Great. Some suggestions to try.

You may have more independent layers than you need. Use independent layers if one thing moving should not affect another one. E.g. the eye pupil moving should not distort the rest of the eye, so it should be independent. But the arms you have ”+Left Arm” with children of “+Left Shoulder”, “+Left Hand”, “+Left Arm”. That feels excessive. (I would also avoid having two layers with the same name for confusion purposes).

If you want independence, I generally suggest having a bit of overlap between the two objects. You then select the child, make sure the attachment property is “Auto”, then drag the origin over the parent object until it goes green. So the shoulder origin you drag to just over the body. This is the attachment point - you can then select hinge, weld, etc depending on how you want the two to join up.  But you generally want a nesting hierarchy to match the attachments (you attach things to parents), so “+Left Hand” and “+Left SHoulder” as children of “+Left Arm” is probably not what you want.

I would start with trying to remove all those “+”s and make them dependent. They will then automatically be joined up, no need to worry about joining them etc. You then put sticks for bones in the arms, draggers on the hands, etc.  After that, you may decide to make the whole left arm independent if you want to, but not the subcomponents. But two levels of independence like what you have is probably overkill.

[alank99101739]

Oh, what also tends to work better is to draw the arms in a “A” or “T” shape - sticking out sideways not touching the body except at the shoulder. That is critical if you don’t make them independent.

Dependence works fine if things touch where you want them to join. Independence generally wants the layers to overlap a bit so when the two layers move independently, you don’t see a gap between them (unless that is what you want of course).