Draggable head on long neck.

[elasmobranchia]

I am developing  puppets with long heads on necks. So I have two slightly different versions of the same puppet. on one the head can be dragged around with the head remaining connected to the neck and neck to the body. On the other iether the head doesn't move or distort or, on other settings which seem identical to the working settings of the first puppet, the neck drags but the head remains fixed. I have spent hours looking at this problem and cannot find a consistent answer.

PS How can I send someone my saved puppet files so that they can see my problem?

[alank99101739]

To share your puppet, use “export as puppet” in the menu. It collects the artwork and all rigging into a .puppet file that others can then import. You then use DropBox, Google Drive, or similar to upload the .puppet file to and share the link as you wish (publicly, in a direct message, etc).  Screenshots and videos can also help, but sharing a puppet is SO much faster to get issues diagnosed... if someone is willing to diagnose it. (I often volunteer after work for fun.)

[elasmobranchia]

Hi. Thanks for your reply. I had the .puppet files ready but didn't know how to share them. Never done that before but very easy.

I would really appreciate you looking at these puppets. they are very much in the developmental stage so swap sets etc not really set up. What I am exploring is whether I can get the puppets working in the way I wantl. If not I really have to rethink how I will animate them.

Glug_side.puppet - Google Drive

Glug_front.puppet - Google Drive

[alank99101739]

Not sure if I addressed your problem or not, but I suggest moving the "head" group as independent under the "neck" group, so head and neck are both independent. Making neck independent to the body means you can move the neck without distorting the body.

Tall Necks Debugging - YouTube

If that is not the problem, sorry, could you try again with the description of the problem?

[alank99101739]

Oh, I forgot also for some reason the contour of the head and neck were rectangles. I changed the "Mesh Shape" property to "Contour" and the warps/distorts a bit better afterwards as well.

(Hmmm, that video above said it was 9 mins long but is only playing for 4 mins... Still got to learn this video streaming game!)

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

Tried the video again. Tall Necks Debugging (attempt 2) Character Animator - YouTube  The previous one got truncated at the juicy part. If it shows up as 10 mins long or so (instead of 5), skip over the first 5 mins (interrupted incomplete recording). It merged two attempts together.

[elasmobranchia]

Thanks for that. Solves the problem for both versions of the puppet. I hadn't realised that the head could be nested. Always thought that it had to be the top level of the puppet. This now opens up all sorts of possibilities I think.

thanks.