Walk Cycle Question

[WolfMan]

I have an additive walk cycle. I want to make the character walk across the screen and stop part way across, turn around and walk back again and then finally turn around at the same spot it started.

I have tried bone flipping, layer flipping, putting the entire character inside a group layer and using the group layer to move the character but nothing works.

The issue appears to be that I must reposition the origin point onto the center of the character at the frame I want it to stop after walking across the screen to then flip it. Otherwise it flips way off the screen when flipped.

The fact that the character must stop and then restart adds a wrinkle. I add a key frame at the point I want it to stop. This seems to cause some kind of problem for the resumed walk cycle that I is copied and pasted on the timeline where I want it to restart. I adjust the key frame cycle values to reflect the new start and end frames for the copied walk cycle.

It appears that the repositioning of the point of origin for flipping interferes with the second copied and pasted walk cycle. As it simply will not work.

If anyone knows how to make a character walk across the screen, stop and turn around and walk back I sure would appreciate any help. I don't need any help to make an additive walk cycle, just to turn it around and stop and start it when I want to. Thanks so much.

[slowtiger]

Most easily solved with 2 copies of the walk cycle character, each in their own direction, and then switch visibity when needed.

To make this work with just one character one must carefully build the rig around the center from the very beginning. I'd create a walk in place and put the character into a group layer which I move across the screen.

[WolfMan]

Thanks for your fast reply SlowTiger. Is it not possible to use the additive walk cycle somehow instead of moving layers? The additive cycle seems much more powerful than a walk -in-place.

[slowtiger]

Can't say because I've never used it so far. I'm oldschool: better to have different rigs fo different actions than desperately trying to get everything in just one.

[WolfMan]

Thanks for the seasoned tip. Much appreciated!

[Greenlaw]

Hi,

Years ago, Victor made a tutorial for animating a walk cycle using Relative Paste in the Timeline. You can watch it here:



Hope this helps. I have some additional info that might help for animating walks, but I'm too busy today to write a long post. Maybe I can post tomorrow.

[WolfMan]

Thank you Greenlaw. Mr. Paredes is phenomenal. He gets into the nitty gritty details. What most of the walk videos do not show is how to make the character turn around, stand up straight and walk back to its starting position and turn around again. That will help a lot. Take care.

[Greenlaw]

Animating a turnaround is a separate topic, but I can offer tips for putting that together with a walk cycle. I'll try to make demo project tonight and post it.

(Busy again, ATM. Not work stuff this time but family holiday stuff. It's always something, isn't it?)

[WolfMan]

Very timely response. I was thinking the same thing. I did manage to get the character to walk across and turn around and come back using a flip. I created a regular action for the walk cycle. This made it easy to restart the walk if I stopped the character from walking. The original walk cycle I was using had some weird issue wrong with it even though it looked ok when run on its own. I am using an additive cycle. After redoing the walk cycle from scratch I did not need to reposition the point of origin that really caused all the problems. I put the character inside a position folder and used the position folder to move it. I could not see how a flip can be slowed down so I am working on character design (front, 3/4, back, 1/4) to use just as you recommend, in conjunction with the walk cycle. Hopefully this will give me control for slowing the turning around. I find the character design for those poses difficult. I am not an artist. Somebody should invent an automated turnaround plugin for both head and body. I do hope you have a fantastic family time! Pizza, ice cream, games and entertainment suggested. O ya, you could turn them into cartoons.

[Hoptoad]

Somebody should invent an automated turnaround plugin for both head and body.

I have no personal need for AI to do anything in my life.

HOWEVER. . .if an AI could could generate multiple turn-around drawings from one of my 2D drawings, I would use it a million times.

[slowtiger]

My main projects of the last two years involved lots of full head turns, so I'm quite versatile now drawing them FBF. Can only recommend this training, after that it's much easier to plan the same in Moho.

[WolfMan]

Me too.

[kenchtahm]

Depending on how you approached the walk cycle, there's a way I use to brute force it. If you set the position of the layer to step, when you flip the layer and the character goes off screen, you can just move the layer to match up with where he should be. If you're moving the layer to make the walk cycle move, just add an extra layer on top of that to adjust the flips.

It's brute force, but it worked fine for me. That said -- I've made a total of one short in Moho so far, so someone like Greenlaw is likely going to have a much more elegant solution

[WolfMan]

The character going off screen was a problem I had that was unsolvable by moving the point of origin around. I learned that I should not be moving the original point of origin. Since nothing would help I scrapped that walk cycle and did a new one from scratch. Somehow the new one had no problems. The old one appeared to work fine until I started using flipping. So, the old walk cycle, even though it seemed perfect had some unknown error in it. I also put the character inside a group folder and use the group folder to move the character. This works for both the walk in place and the additive walk cycles. My lesson learned: if everything should work, but it doesn't, redo from scratch and see if there was something invisible that was the problem. Thanks for your help!