How to drag hands without stretching arms?

[alank99101739]

Hi oksamurai​ - in your March 2018 tips and tricks video, at around 22:07 you record a hand drag for the robot. When I do hand drags, my puppet arms get stretched (see below). In your video, the arm of the robot did not stretch - it just went in the direction of the mouse. How did you achieve this? Arms that stretch makes it harder to get the drag recording right.

Thanks!

PS: The YouTube video is a bit funny - I cannot find it in the list of episodes for the channel. Maybe Google needs to update its indexes still?

[alank99101739]

I screen grabbed the video - see the cursor is a long way away from the hand? How did you achieve this?

[oksamurai]

Yeah, I had to take the video down due to encoding issues for some viewers - should be back up tomorrow.

That's a really good observation! I think it's based on a few things.

1 - The second dragger behavior seems to be critical to making this work. If I just have one dragger and no underlying recording, it does the usual stretchiness.

2. Her arm is set up as Weld attach style with a second draggable handle in the elbow - which I used very sparingly to fix elbow issues.

Let me know if that works for you!

[alank99101739]

Ah, what seems to happen is when you have two draggers it averages (?) between the two drag positions. So you get more play in the movement, but it still will stretch if you go far enough away. If you are close to the body, the sticks stop the arm from compressing. It means you can be less precise with mouse movements, which makes it a bit easier.