How to rig a puppet without legs to use motion library?

[XM_NL]

Hi all!

I hope you can help me out. I'm trying to create a puppet that's basically a coil/spring with eyes and arms. The idea is that he moves by jumping around (because he's a spring). I wanted to use the motion library, so we can use the jump animations.

So I have a puppet with a body, a face, left arm and right arm. I added sticks with dangle to the body on the places of the coil lines, so it doesn't bend in unnatural ways and still is bouncy. So far, so good. 

Now when I add a jumping motion from the library, the puppet kind of jumps but he also rotates around the center slowly. So after 5 jumps he's upside-down. How can I prevent this?

What I already tried:

- Adding handles with head/neck/hips/knees/heels along the body. This caused the coil to be unrecognizably torn apart during the jumping motion. 

- Adding knees/feet with separate handles also torns the puppet apart, because his "feet" are just the bottom line of the spring and can't move independently.

Any help or pointers are much appriciated

[TheOriginalGC]

I've made puppets without bodies and puppets without legs before. Nothing quite like yours, though. The closest example I can think of had a body, head and arms. Have you put your face elements inside a head and everything else inside the body? What happens?

[XM_NL]

I guess I just need to play around a bit more. I found that if I don't tag the body as a head, the motion library motions don't work at all. 

And whatever I try, the puppet keeps slowly tipping over during the animation. After 10 loops it's just lying on his side..

[TheOriginalGC]

One thing you can try is "Record One Motion" (under advanced settings in the Motion Library behavior). That way, you can use the single jump over and over again.