Walk cycle works but hands get dragged down toward knees

[sba18]

Hi there! I built a puppet off the Maddy template and the walk cycle looks good except that my puppets hands are dragged really low in the walk cycle. Any ideas? I've tried untagging and retagging the arms a zillion different ways (no elbow, yes elbow, no wrist, yes wrist, no sticks, yes sticks, draggable, not draggable) and I tried moving the hips and waist tags up and down (thinking that maybe they determine how low the arms go)- nothing has worked! Are you able to explain how the walk cycle interprets the arms so that I can figure this out?

[Aaron Sugar]

I would try a couple of things.  First of all, have you tried playing around with the "neck" location.  As I understand, the arms will rotate around the neck.  The other thing I would try is changing where you have the walk behavior assigned.  Is it on the puppet itself, or the top layer of the puppet.  Beyond that, adjusting the arm angle and elbow bend within the walk behavior might also help. 

I've been having some of the same problems myself, so let me know what you find works best.

[sba18]

the walk cycle is applied to the topmost layer b/c this puppet has 3 views but I have other human puppets set up the same way where the arms look normal so I'm not sure what's going on here. I wish I could find a description of how Walk Cycle interprets the different points we assign on the body in order to produce the walk. Has anyone come across anything like that?

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

I think this is an issue of a 3/4 view character vs. a profile character (what CH walk is currently optimized for). I ran into the same thing with Evans ( http://okaysamurai.com/puppets/ ) - because he's more 3/4, no matter what I did with the arms, I couldn't get them to work. The Walk behavior is looking for the relationship between the legs and arms and if they're not over top of each other as they would be in profile, things can get wonky. With your character, you might be able to experiment with moving the arms and legs more towards the center and see if that helps.

[sba18]

thanks oksamurai! you nailed it. I moved the arms each in toward the center and now they function much more normally in the walk cycle. I'll adjust my profile bodies to be further turned out so it looks consistent.

[sba18]

see below! oksamurai figured it out