Independent Arms While Walking

[TinyTim2046]

How do we allow our characters to gesture and move their arms independently of the walk cycles?  The walk cycles kinda takes control of the whole body, but I want my characters arm movements to be independent of the cycle so they can gesture while they walk.  What do we do?  I can't believe I haven't seen this covered anywhere.

Thank you.

[alank99101739]

I don’t use walk cycle much, but my understanding is walk cycle is like automated draggers. You can drag when the walk cycle does not control the arms. (Sorry, too busy to try it just now.)

If you want to talk over the arms *sometimes* when walking, you could make a second copy of the arms in swapsets - so you trigger the swapset when you want to take over manually (which hides the automatically controlled arms).  The artwork can be identical - but the second copy would not have the handle points on it for controlling by the walk behavior (only draggers so you control things manually).

[Caleb24766126mhux]

Removing the wrist and elbow tags worked for me.

I first attempted to override the walk behavior as @mre8 suggested without removing the tags, but was unsuccessful. I could pivot the wrists, but couldn't control the position or movement of the elbow tags. 

[Daniel McKittrick Ramirez]

This works, but you lose the ability to use LimbIK which can be a deal breaker for some puppet rigs. 

[mre8]

Attach a dragger to each arm (at the wrist?).

Create one dragger behavior for each arm layer you want to control.

Record the walk cycle for the amount of time you need it.

On another pass, record enable the dragger behaviors you created for each arm (can do both or one at a time) and drag the arms how you want them to move while walking.

The recorded arm dragger behaviors will override the influence of the walk behavior.

I believe this is also true of triggers you may assign to arms.

I did not like how the walk behavior was moving the arms, so I created a replay with arm motion (using the draggers as I said above). This is good if you want to use the same arm movement every time the puppet walks. You can trigger the walk and the replay at the same time while recording.

[Daniel McKittrick Ramirez]

Great question. I'm hoping we can add an option to Walk for "just legs" vs. "arms and legs", but for now, there's a good, if clunky workaround. 

Add a Walk behavior to each arm and set the strength to 0%. This will free the arms of any influence from a Walk behavior, allowing you complete independent control from other behaviors(Dragger/Body/etc.)

[CocoLoco24635517vog1]

Hey @Daniel McKittrick Ramirez , 

I tried your solution for adding the walk behavior to the arm. I applied it to one arm and when I checked the character with a walk it worked!  The arm loses it's swing but at least I can position it and hold it in place like up in the air or something. However as soon as did the same to the other arm the entire character flipped upside down and became warped. Any idea why that might be happening?