Unexpected walking behavior

[chetgnegy]

Walk cycles are awesome... until they aren't. A big problem I often have is that when they don't more or less work out of the box, I can't figure out why or how to fix them. My goal is to have a four legged creature that crawls. I've seen Dave's awesome demo about how to do this by using additional walk behaviors and I understand it in principle.

Here is my character. I want to use two sets of arms, one in the front, one in the back. I set up the two arms on the back legs and a neck right above the legs. I could also use legs, but arms have more control over angle, so I'm starting there.

Even when I set up only the back legs/arms, things are already looking crazy. The neck, and arms all get pulled up waaay higher than the rest of my model. I don't expect things to stray too far from the markers I pick. Can someone explain what I'm doing wrong?

Here is a link to my model. Does anyone have any ideas? FourLegs.zip - Google Drive

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwMWJzcF_bmkQWpmT3U1WU1HdTg

[oksamurai]

I see a few issues at quick glance:

• There are two neck tags, one on the Body and one in Body Inner. We normally only recommend one and to tag the whole Head group as it (see Walkbot).
• There are no waist or hip tags on the Body group. The legs need these to work correctly.
• The top Monkie folder isn't independent - it should be (add a crown).

I'd say check out Acquavella at http://okaysamurai.com/puppets/ - He's a multi-limbed character that seems to follow a similar structure and be a good guide.

[chetgnegy]

>> There are two neck tags, one on the Body and one in Body Inner. We normally only recommend one and to tag the whole Head group as it (see Walkbot).

I was hoping to have two sets of arm-neck markers, one neck near the front and one near the back. In the past, I recall you remarking that arms are looking for a neck and legs are looking for a hip/waist. I'm seeing now that the situation is a bit more complicated than that--adding a waist/hip changes where the arms are pulled. They get pulled down instead of up when I put waist/hip markers down below the feet. It's really hard for me to predict what the result of moving the neck, waist, or hip in any direction.

>> There are no waist or hip tags on the Body group. The legs need these to work correctly.

That's correct. I was aiming to not have legs, just two sets of arms. Seems like this isn't handled well. It would be helpful to know more about what happens when markers are missing.

>> The top Monkie folder isn't independent - it should be (add a crown).

This reduces some warping of the head, but doesn't have much impact on the body (not that you were claiming it would).

[oksamurai]

Ah yeah, ok - sorry, I misread this, forgot they were all supposed to be arms. Check out this thread - Six Arms, Four Eyes, and a Bunch of Questions - Dave S explains "For individual arm groups that have their own Walk behavior, you'll need to add a dummy Neck-tagged handle within the group -- Walk rotates the arms around the neck. You'll probably want to adjust Arm Angle and Strength for those arms, since they're not in the standard profile arrangement."

In this arms-only case, I'm not sure how much waist and hips will have much effect on the arms - but they do create some basic up and down locomotion movement I know (if you have a Walk behavior character and add just the hip, waist, and body, it will start bouncing).

Making the top-level character independent helps with mobility. If you use Transform to move a character, have a Walk behavior or draggable handle, or anything else that makes it move, you want that to prevent warping and tearing. One day we'll make it work without it but for now, it's always helpful to have just in case.

I think (like we talked about a while back) the main issue here is just how the walk behavior wasn't designed for 4 armed characters, and you're running into the current limitations of how it was set up. Walk now expects to see a waist above a hip in the body group, and a neck on the Head group. It expects the character to have 2 legs and 2 arms in a vertical profile view. When you start to stray from that, issues happen. Even some of my 3/4 characters, like Evans the robot, have issues - I've never been able to get his hands to work properly because of the way I drew him.

Anyway - I hope that bug example helps, that's the closest to what you're doing that I've seen (I know he's not walking on his hands, but it's the only multi-armed example I can think of in recent memory).

[chetgnegy]

Thanks again.

From your post on ‘six arms…’ “basically walk is only looking for the first instance of a tag it sees"

This is what I had in mind with multiple necks.

Body (walk behavior 1, has neck, waist, hips)

- L Leg (arm tags)

- R Leg (arm tags)

- Body inner (walk behavior 2, has neck2, waist2, hips2)

  - R Arm (arm tags)

  - L Arm (arm tags)

Would walk behavior 2 see neck2 or neck1 first? Would you expect to get two independent walk actions from this?

Also, unrelated, but the forum is acting badly when typing in this reply. Every time I try to type a new character the window jumps (nearly) to the top of the page. Backspacing works without moving the page. Refreshing the page and re-replying didn’t help so the problem may be reproducible.

[oksamurai]

If I understand what Dave S said in that other thread, every arm group needs its own neck handle. So I think for your example, you would want to a) add the Walk behavior to each limb group (L Leg, R Leg, R Arm and L Arm), and b) put the neck-tagged handles on each group. I feel like if you do that, you should be able to only have one body and one instance of the hip and waist.

Yeah I'm running into the same forum bug. Annoying.