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The.Ease.Knees
Participant
December 8, 2025
Answered

Body Tracking Rigging Shoulders

  • December 8, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 838 views

Hi there, newbie here!

 

So I have been going through the tutorials and am trying to rig a character to use body tracking.  The most helpful tutorial thus far has been the Limb IK tut.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e85HGSAS80g  Unfortunately there has been some conflicting info on where to identfy the shoulder tags.  One into tut said to attach to the body when rigging for more realistic head tilt and the one linked above says to tag shoulders on the puppet's arm layers.

 

Going through the Body Tracker tut https://pages.adobe.com/character/en/body-tracker it is now also saying to tag the shoulders on the body.

 

Is there a definitive answer for this or this a case of, "it depends on whether or not you want to make use of body tracking"!!

 

I'm concerned about experimenting and making changes as the history seems to sometimes break the puppet and I have had to start over from scratch.  I'm so close to being able to put this project behind me!

 

    Correct answer The.Ease.Knees

    So it appears you can just add another Body behavior to the top level of a puppet that has been rigged to enable better head tilting control as instructed in some of the key tutorials mentioned in this thread.  (5 Advanced Character Tips , Limb IK, etc.)  Simply rename the behavior that is recommended to be changed to Body (was Face) to be Old Face or such and proceed from there.  It also seems that you don't 100% need to tag your shoulders and hips in the Body layer.  After I made these changes, I was able to get Body Tracking to work somewhat as expected per the tutorial.  (Basically enabled, so maybe premature)

     

    Body tracking hopefully allows for more smooth, natural hand and arm gestures.

     

    Note, you also need to have the blue gradient background option turned off in the camera menu for body tracking, if you move too far away you will disappear.

    2 replies

    TheOriginalGC
    Community Expert
    TheOriginalGCCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 9, 2025

    I've seen it done both ways and I cannot tell you if one way is better than the other. When I first started rigging puppets, I included the shoulder nodes as part of the arms, but I've loaded puppets from the puppetmaker that have the shoulder nodes as part of the body. I do not believe that changing the nodes in a puppet's rigging from one layer to another would lead to any mishaps, but if you want to play it safe, use the export menu to save the current version of your puppet to reload in case ypu run into any problems.

    T
    The.Ease.KneesAuthor
    Participant
    December 9, 2025

    Ok, thanks OGC.  I just did a project Save Project As for testing a-la other Adobe CS apps but I'll first give the Export method a try.  

    • So an exported Puppet is the top level file, not project file, correct?

    • Is there a process for going backwards and removing rigging so that all tags, etc .are fully removed safely from the project or puppet?

    TheOriginalGC
    Community Expert
    TheOriginalGCCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 9, 2025

    The exported puppet includes the art, rigging and any replays that you have put into the puppet. What it won;t have would be any animation that you might have in the timeline part of your project. Exported puppets can be imported into any project using the file menu. From there, you will add them to your scene by dragging the selected puppet down to the timeline. 

     

    To remove the nodes, you select them by using the selection tool (the arrow in the bottom of the rigging tools menu). If you need to select several nodes at once, hold down the shift key while selecting the additional parts. You delete the selected node(s) by pressing the delete key. Just so you know, selecting a different layer will automatically de-select anything you had selected in the previous layer.

    T
    The.Ease.KneesAuthor
    Participant
    December 8, 2025

    One more thing to mention, I'm using the multiple Face behavior method of maing the head tilt more independently of the body.  I have changed the Face behavior to be named Body as recommended at the top level of the puppet and employed a Frontal grouping.  

     

    Should I name the original Face behavior to Body ALT and add a new Body behavior?

    T
    The.Ease.KneesAuthor
    Participant
    December 9, 2025

    My next question this fresh new morning is, without starting from scratch, is it possible to remove the entitre rig and start over.  I don't want to go that route since so much is already working.  However, my current body behavior has a mouth!  Is it ok to add a new body behavior and make the old renamed face to be Face 2 or such?  

     

    Although, I'm assuming I have to also remove the frontal group, which will likely chuck a wrench in the works as the hierarchy will be back to the old way, not as with the head tilt work-around.

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