Hands not connecting to arms

[First Time Animator]

Hi,

I'm a first-timer at this whole animation thing and I'm having a hard time with arm and hand rigging. I have tagged all of the parts of my arm and made my wrist draggable but I am unable to connect my hand to my arm to have them move altogether. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

For some reason, I am unable to post the file. 

[First Time Animator]

Looks like the files did post but it was saying "unable to complete ..."

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

The best way to share your puppet is to use "export puppet" from the menus in Ch. This includes the artwork and rigging.

From the rigging hierarchy however it appears you have nested independent layers, which is the cause of your problem i think. You have an independent right arm and independent right hand in an independent right arm layer. First, i would give them different names to avoid confusion, but if you ever see an independent layer where all children are independent, then something is almost certainly wrong. Each layer should contain some artwork for child layers to attach to. In your case i think the nested independent right arm should not be independent. That way the parent artwork contains some artwork for the independent hand to attach to.

You also want a root puppet (which is independent) for body and head to be a child of.

+John Smith (your puppet name)

- Head (this can be independent)

- Body (rarely independent - this artwork is included in the root mesh)

- - +Right Arm (independent is fine here)

- - - +Right Hand (independent is fine, as we will attach the the arm artwork)

- - - arm artwork (don't make this independent)

- - +Left Arm

- - - ...

- - Torso artwork (must be some artwork of the body for the arms to attach to)

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

Going a little further, It is important to understand there is the layer hierarchy in the puppet artwork, but there is also a MESH hierarchy. A new mesh is started each time an independent layer is found. (That is what independence does - start a new mesh). Any artwork under a layer that is not independent is included on its parent layer mesh.

Meshes attach to their parent mesh by having some overlapping artwork. Like the arm overlapping the shoulder of the body a bit. With no overlap, it is hard to connect the layers. If an independent layer only has independent children, then the parent mesh is empty - no artwork in it. There is then no,artwork for the children to attach to (nothing to overlap with) so the child do not attach correctly to the parent.

If you turn on the mesh icons at the bottom of the scene panel etc, the yellow outline shows the mesh outline. This gives a hint want is in that mesh.

[First Time Animator]

Alan,

Thank you so much for your expertise and for taking the time to help the rookie. I made a duplicate of my puppet and organized the groups and layers according to your guidance and everything worked out. Thanks again so much.