Character Arm Animation Not Animating Relative To Torso


Above ive attached a drawing to better indicate what i mean from the title. It could be a bit hard to tell but basically the animated part should move with the torso, but it ends up just facing same direction; its rotation completely unaffected by torso movement. Notice how the arrows are out of sync in the bottom one compared to the first.

Basically, im animating a gun that the player holds in their hand, and its scripted so when the player looks up or down, the waist attachment is adjusted, thus moving the entire torso, and all attached parts like the arms and head to face up or down with the camera.

However ive run into an issue while animating the tool and arm. Ive had this issue before with other projects but its especially noticeable now with the adjustable waist, but basically, the arm and tool when animated, face straight forward at all times, just as they were facing when animated. This means the players torso can be facing straight up or down, but the idle-holding animation has the gun pointing straight forward. Naturally this also happens with reload, equip, and trigger animations.

Its almost as if the animation itself is inputting the animated rotation value relative to the character model as a whole, and not relative to attachments like the shoulder which the arm should be carried by. Animating with the move and rotate settings set to local-space and not world-space does not fix this.

How would I go about fixing this so an animated arm and tool can face the same direction as the torso? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I think this would be caused by the way you rigged the player. Rigged parts have a hierarchy, so if you connected the torso to the arm rather than the arm to the torso, it could easily cause this.

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How does this hierarchy work? Im animating a default R15 Rig generated by studio itself. Ive made no edits to it other then giving it a tool.

While doing research i discovered the IK menu, everything seems to be set up correctly but it still fails to animate properly even with IK enabled.

Hmm strange. I would try to help but I’m not that experienced with animation. Perhaps try posting under the animation and rigging category?

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Actually i just figured it out! I noticed the non-animated arm wasn’t moving with the torso either and was just pointing downward, which was very strange cause its like the arms were naturally locked or something. So I looked up why that is, and I found this DevForum post: Why are arms not moving in sync with the torso?

Turns out a Property under Workspace called “Retargeting” needs to be disabled. I did more reading on what Retargeting even is, and i guess it’s supposed to allow animations to be more compatible across multiple different rigs or something like that? Idk, at least to me it seems to do the opposite. Here’s the post introducing it: [Opt-out Phase] Introducing Animator Retargeting for Supporting a Single Animation on Multiple Rigs

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