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How to make a draggable body with IK legs?

New Here ,
Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

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Hello, my question is if I can have a character with a draggable body, with legs that stay in place and knees that bend? Recently I had an animation I needed to do and it would have been nice if I could have that sort of effect. You can have IK arms, and you can have draggable legs, and walking legs, but I've never seen a tutorial or instance of anyone having a character that can bounce up and down and have the legs bend but stay in place. This is fairly easy to do with 3D rigging but I haven't been able to get this to work in character animator.

IK_legs.gif

Here is an attempt I've made to get there. I've tried rigging the legs like you would for a walk cycle, I've tried making them independent and non independent. Here's what the leg rig currently looks like:

leg_rig.png

I wondered if tricking character animator into thinking the legs were IK arms would allow the behavior I wanted but it didn't work. I tried with both tagging them as arms and legs and the result is the same. If anyone knows of a way to achieve this please let me know. Thanks!

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Adobe Employee , Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

Love the character! I don't think there's a perfect solution to this currently, but the closest I can think of is Gene from adobe.com/go/chexamples. You can drag his waist area to get some longer leg action and knee bending without too much warping. Note the way he's set up is a little unorthodox - all the rigging (draggables and sticks) is done on the top +Character level.

Screen Shot 2019-07-09 at 1.20.35 PM.png

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Adobe Employee ,
Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

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Love the character! I don't think there's a perfect solution to this currently, but the closest I can think of is Gene from adobe.com/go/chexamples. You can drag his waist area to get some longer leg action and knee bending without too much warping. Note the way he's set up is a little unorthodox - all the rigging (draggables and sticks) is done on the top +Character level.

Screen Shot 2019-07-09 at 1.20.35 PM.png

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New Here ,
Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

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bendy_legs.gif

Hey oksamurai!

Thanks for pointing me to the example rig! That's basically what I was looking for, and definitely not the setup I would have guessed. It seems that unlike IK arms you don't have much control over bend direction and whatnot but I can work around that. Thanks for the help!

Update:

I seems if you drag the knees which in my case are draggable handles you can fix which ways the legs will bend, albeit the bend is then a bit more stiff.

bendy_legs_2.gif

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Adobe Employee ,
Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

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The rigging from the picture should be OK. Put sticks in the legs and have the legs *not* independent. Doing this should get what you want. If you're still running into issues, feel free to post the puppet and I'll take a look at it.

Dan R.
CHQA

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LEGEND ,
Jul 09, 2019 Jul 09, 2019

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One extension of the trick you described is to do short recordings of the knees. That gets the bend going in the right direction. You can trim back the knee drag recording after that. You may need to sneak a few in if the legs completely straighten, but gives a bit more movement in the lower legs.

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