Walk cycle issue: weird morphing when multiple views are in the file

[jan-lukasw1244839]

Hi animators, 

I need your help! I ran into a strange issue when prepping my character for a walk cycle. I have a frontal view and two quarter views (left and right). When I use a file that contains all 3 views at once, the walk cycle looks awful, and Character Animator seems to get confused by the hidden layers of the other two views. The result is a very distorted and morphed image; the shoulders shift to weird positions, and parts of the body move strangely up and down. Sometimes the puppet even gets stuck in frontal view, but the walk animation is still going on, resulting in a weird dance move.

When I use a file that contains only one view and rig this view exactly like the other, then re result is much better. No weird displacement, shoulders look fine, only part of the head seems to stick to one position.

I have watched all of the rigging tutorials for walk cycles out there, and I know that Character Animator always uses the whole mesh, invisible layers included, for animation. I believe the reason for my problem lies somewhere there. In rig mode, the yellow outline does not match my character's outline for the active layer. 

I organised the laver hierarchy as follows:

Head

• Frontal
• Left Quarter
• Right Quarter

Body

• Frontal
• Left Quarter
• Right Quarter

So my question is: Is a puppet like mine with all three views and a decently looking walk cycle simply impossible to do at this point, or is there a technique to achieve this?

Would a clever workaround be to have the different views as three separate puppets if it's not possible? And how do I fix the face that seems to stay in one place in the second video? I feel like it would look more natural if the whole head section moves as a whole.

Thanks for your help,

Cheers,

Jan

[oksamurai]

The Walk behavior can be kinda finnicky. Two things I noted right away:

• Your views are called left/right quarter, but walk wants left/right profile views instead.
• Typically in walk behaviors everything is inside the view, not separated like you show. So instances of the Head and body would each be inside the frontal, left profile, and right profile views. That should be how Eliza is set up on okaysamurai.com/puppets.

If you're looking for 3 stationary views in addition to the walking views, then yes, I would probably make that a different puppet. I usually have one walking version of my characters and one standing-only version.

For things sticking or warping strangely, some of the stuff in here might help for troubleshooting, specifically independence and origins: https://youtu.be/CEJEVBHl0EE