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asirbu91
asirbu91
Participant
May 2, 2019
Question

Draggable arms when the puppet has only head

  • May 2, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 249 views

Hi everyone! I have a puppet for which the body and the head are a single shape (as Face bg). I would like to have draggable arms, but they would have the origin in the common body/head shape.

Is there a way to make that happen? Cheers!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    May 3, 2019

    Arms drifting away is normally an attachment issue. The screenshot you included had independent arms under an independent body Where the body had no artwork (just two independent children, so the mesh would be empty for the Body layer).

    So I would have removed independence from the Body layer, then checked the Attach To property of the arms to make sure set to Auto, and the origin handle overlaps the body/head mesh So the origin circle goes green. I think this is your problem - the arms are not attached correctly (e.g. Attach To got sent to something strange when Body was empty)

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    May 2, 2019

    Okay, looking closer at rigging hierarchy I might have misunderstood.

    If you are not using walk behaviors etc, then it is fine to attach the arms to the head for example. You have independent arms already (good) under and independent body. I am not sure why the body needs to be independent.  But just realize there is no requirement to have a body layer - you can attach the arms under the head instead if you want to.

    Since the arms are independent, the origin of the arm needs to be dragged to where the arms overlaps with the rest of the artwork. Having Body independent, if there is no artwork in Body, this will not be possible. Solution: turn off independence for Body so Head and Body are in the same mesh, then its easy for the arms to attach To the Head/Body mesh. (Or just move the arms under the Head layer)

    asirbu91
    asirbu91Author
    Participant
    May 3, 2019

    Hi Alank, sorry for the late reply. I've tried these solutions, and I don't seem to get it right. I might make some changes to the character design, so it's not really pressing, but would be nice to figure it out for the future.

    It only partially works if the arms are in the same mesh with the head. I got them to work like this by turning the independence of the arms off like you suggested. If I try to move them over the head/body of my character are going to twist it, even with sticks. I can only move them without twisting the mesh to a limited extent outside the head area, as soon as I overlap twisting occurs.

    I've also tried to move the arms in the head layer, giving up the body layer completely as you suggested. But I got similar results.

    There seem to be no way I could figure out, where the arms are kept independent so they don't twist the head/body, but the origin of the arms group is still attached fixed at the shoulder (connected to the head in my case). As soon as  I make them independent, even though I change the attached to - to say Head - for the arms group, and make sure that the origin of the group overlaps the head background artwork, it will not connect to the head, and when I try to drag them, it will just detach them from the rest of the character.

    alank99101739
    alank99101739
    Legend
    May 2, 2019

    It works no problem - arms do not have to be independent. It just often looks better as moving the arms warps the body otherwise. To minimize this warping, put sticks along the edge of the body where the arm joins the body to restrict how much twisting of the body can occur.

    If you don’t want the body to warp when arms move, then you have to make the arms independent to stop that.

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