Action walk question

[mkelley]

I'm feeling especially stupid here, but I'm trying to animate a walk (4-legged -- yep, might as well jump in to a harder degree of difficulty :>) and I can get a cycle just fine -- lock the leg(s), move the body and reposition the other leg(s), unlock the first set and lock the second, cycle rinse and repeat.

All well and good, but to animate a character walking more than a few steps is a PITA. Well, that's what actions are good for, right? Um, I guess I don't get it.

I define the action but when I insert it multiple times it goes "wonky" as it moves back to the starting position with each insert. I realize the idea (right?) is to move the layer along as the action progresses, but because of the locking/unlocking the feet move all over the place as the body bone is moved (by the cycling of the action) back to the beginning so there is no way this looks like a cycle.

(Oh, as an aside I tried cycling by clicking the keys and setting cycle with the same results, with both absolute and relative).

So... am I going about this all wrong? Can I not lock down the feet to move in a walk cycle? Can someone just give me a workflow here to get me off this hump? How do you actually do a walk cycle?

TIA for any ideas, suggestions, or winning lotto numbers.

[Nolan Scott]

Hi mkelley,

Here is a very simple walkcycle, done with 24 frames, than cycled.
If you like please download the file:

"file removed"

Cheers
Nolan

[mkelley]

Nolan,

I appreciate the response but that doesn't really answer my question. I can manually make a walk cycle, but I want to use the lock bone technique -- are you saying that your walk cycle uses that?

Because it doesn't seem to me that locking bones and moving the base bone will cycle properly.

[mkelley]

In looking at your stuff (very cool, Nolan) while I see that you don't use bone locks I also note you don't move the parent bone other than up and down.

So perhaps that's what I'm doing wrong -- trying to get the creature to actually move rather than walk in place. I'll give it a try tomorrow (with bone locks) and see if I have any more success. Thanks for that.

Just as a purely curious note, why do you have bones coming down after the end of the foot? Do these help you like having IK handles? (I use that sort of thing in 3D all the time but am just trying to come to grips with this 2D stuff).

[Nolan Scott]

Well, normally (what is normal...) I do my walk-cycles on the spot (in place)
and move them later with the Translate-Layer-Tool into position, much easier for me.
(with this technique “Bone Locking” is hardly needed).

Of course walking a character through the scene (looks much more individual),
Bone-Locking becomes an very effective and essential tool.
Be careful to lock and unlock the legs at the right position, otherwise they might snap, and one has to animate them back into position again.
(my experience, sometimes the way to go)

Regarding the extra bones at the end of the feet:
Well, I presume it’s just a matter of personal style / one could do nicely without it.
This bone just locks the leg (without using the “Lock Bone” feature”) when you want
to move the Foot-Bone alone....

Cheers
Nolan

[heyvern]

Actions won't work for a "moving" walk cycle. A repeating action is always going to go back to the start. There is no way to "add" actions or "accumulate" the forward motion. I tried EVERYTHING to pull this off including writing a script for it.

The action should be just the movement of the legs walking in place. Then you would "add" to the action in the main time line by translating bones that control the forward motion of the whole skeleton (like root bones or bones higher up in the chain that don't move in the action).

Remember in your action not to key any bones that would control forward motion.

What you would need to do is set the cycled action to loop (cycle key frame interpolation). Then just key the forward motion bones normally.

This isn't a perfect solution. You could also try to move the layer for forward motion but I don't recommend this. It is a pain switching back and forth from layer keys to bone keys. Best to do it all with bone keys if possible.

-vern

[slowtiger]

I've mentioned it elsewhere in more detail, but I walk my characters in place, then put them into a group layer and use this to move it all over the scene, including size changes. All movement inside that group is cycled.

[dueyftw]

In Poser, (oh no! I use Poser) I would use the symmetry feature. Where I would swap one side of a four legged animal to the other, so the movement of the right side would then have the same position of the left after moving the four legged creature froward.

The same could be done in AS by having a front side switch and back side switch that uses interpolate on the same frame.

See the file:

http://rapidshare.com/files/73120822/fo ... .moho.html

Dale

[mkelley]

Thanks, guys -- I really appreciate all the responses.

In coming from a 3D background we *always* move the character in space (natch) so this walking in place is a little unintuitive. We can also define actions and link them together, but then we have switches where it can be relative or absolute to the space (so it will continue the forward motion). I'm surprised AS doesn't have this but perhaps the next version will at least consider it (is there a wish list somewhere?).

I didn't get to play with walks today but will work some more on it tomorrow. So I don't try and reinvent an impossible wheel, does anyone define character walks as actions and then apply them to other characters? (Assuming this is even possible -- I was thinking you could at least copy the keys in an action and paste them to another character).

My thought was that you could have libraries of walks -- yes, you'd probably have to tweak the walk because the skeletons wouldn't match up (another advantage -- in 3D we have automatic tools that adjust for different skeletons and have whole libraries of motions to be applied to any character) but at least you wouldn't be starting from scratch each time.

If this IS impossible perhaps it's good for another wish list.