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QueenSonya
Participant
August 23, 2018
Question

Problems with character walk cycle

  • August 23, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 3654 views

Hi!

I started playing around with character animator a couple of weeks ago and its been amazing! I created a panda as my first character and so far the tutorials online have been very helpful, however, when I started getting into creating a walk cycle with a frontal, right profile and left profile views , things starts to get messed up. I tagged my character's body and face like I did with the frontal view but when I tried the walk cycle in profile the arms wouldn't move and the blink wasn't working on one side. I tried using the arrow keys to control the movement but my character started disappearing and would only appear when I would press the arrow key and the arms still wouldn't move!. Any assistance with this would be appreciated! I have attached videos of my character recording. Thanks!

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2 replies

SharonfromMD
SharonfromMD
Inspiring
August 25, 2018

I honestly know very little about rigging because I bought my puppets. However, I would put your puppet in a different background than black or white, just to do the recordings. You might be able to see something a little clearer.

alank99101739
alank99101739
Legend
August 26, 2018

Suggestions.

  • The "Right Arm" has a draggable tag on the arm origin handle. No good reason for that - I would remove that tag.

  • Watch out for "Attach To" values other than "Auto" - they are generally wrong.

Change to "Auto" and then make sure the origin is a green dotted circle indicating attached properly. (The right profile eye needs fixing too.)

Repeat for all arms and legs.

You also have a hidden layer for the leg - as well. You need to delete it. Hidden does not hide it from Character Animator - it just makes it not visible on the screen. That can cause strange warping to happen.

I avoid tags on origin handles - I hit problems at times. E.g. Right profile head you have tag on origin handl, on the mouth (added manually) plus the body layer has one too!

Oh, the right eye blink layer needs to be turned off by default, to blink turns it on to cause blinks. (That is why the right eye was closed).

I also took the sticks out of the legs - with such short stumpy legs I don't think you need them - unless you want to put knees in. I think it looks fine without them.

All the tags on the head (nose, mouth, etc) stop the walk from moving the head, so I removed them as well.

I then put a handle a distance apart for the head and neck and tagged them. Move these around until it looks good.

You were also missing waist and hip handles - these are important to get the body moving.

The right profile works better then - but you can keep fiddling until its like you want.

Note: I only did the right profile - but I noted all the changes I made above.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Hm55-4t8kKy2xRy46OFCym0Ou3Lveqm4

Q
QueenSonyaAuthor
Participant
August 27, 2018

Thank you alank99101739!

Il include the suggestions you made and report back!

I had included hidden layers of arms and legs in my character file because I was trying to make him hold a guitar in his hands and was trying to figure out if I could use trigger keys to change his hand positions from holding a guitar to having his hands empty. Would I have to make two separate puppets to accomplish that or would trigger keys work? (One holding the guitar and one with his hands empty?)

alank99101739
alank99101739
Legend
August 23, 2018

Walking is hard! (There was another post in forums today as well.) Oksamauri had a recent tips and trips video on walking etc that might be worth watching.

In the puppet hierarchy, you did not expand the arms layers so it was hard to see what the structure was there. Could you expand and click on the arm layer to show the tagging and mesh for the arm?

I noticed the root of the puppet was not independent. Any reason for that?

Also your screen shot showed 2 head tags visible - that was a bit strange.

I tend to avoid putting tags on origin markers - I think it causes problems at times. So I would suggest removing the “Head” tag from the “Head“ origin marker. I don’t recall why, but memory tells me this causes problems. The origin marker is how something attaches to the parent, but the tags are telling Ch how to do automatic drags. Mixing the two up I think is problematic for walking. So I always create separate handles for Head, Neck, Waist Etc and never use origin markers (the dotted circles).

Also, I always suggest “Attach To” for independent layers be “Auto” - unless you know what you are doing. It works better. You then have to set the origin handle to overlap the parent group (so the origin handle turns green) - that defines how the layer pivots with respect to the parent.

And feel free to send an export of the puppet if the above does not help. Easier to debug that way - as I said, walking is one of the tricker things to debug.

Q
QueenSonyaAuthor
Participant
August 24, 2018

Hi alank99101739​

Thanks for promptly replying!  I don't know why the root puppet wasn't independent, just corrected that! Thanks!

I have attached my panda puppet file in this post, so feel free to take a look at it and let me know what im doing wrong! at this point im not sure where to start troubleshooting but il really appreciate all the feedback I can get!

Panda puppet file- https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vwQY-5osyEbzv8xFlOqmpk8lN_nt6LPb

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