CGTalk - walking a char through a scene...

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jchedley

06-02-2003, 12:39 PM

Hi,

Ive been working in the games industry for a while now, and as such all my animation work has been 'on the spot' ie a walk cycle or sneak cycle never moves from world coords 0,0,0

Ive been wondering what methods people use when they want to actually move the char around the world.

do most people animate a character cycle under a parent null, and slide the null around the world (and hence get feet slide problems), OR, do people animate in world coords, and lose the flexibility of having things locally keyed under a null (soudns like a bad idea).

some sort of setup whereby the feet are controlled independently and therefore stick to the ground in world space?

im starting work with XSI (moving from soft3D, then maya), and lm interested in how people tackle this problem.

any tips would be welcome :)

many thanks,

john.

Joril

06-02-2003, 03:35 PM

do most people animate a character cycle under a parent null, and slide the null around the world (and hence get feet slide problems)

That's the way I did them before. I'm on Lightwave so what I do is I loop the walk animation using Motion Mixer (non liniar animation tool)
Parent the character to a null and move the null, just like you said.
Then tweak it so that the feet seem to lock to the floor. With a little efford you can pull it off :)
(I should seek some better method though. But it'll do for now)

I heard MAX has some kind of null that makes feet stick to the ground though.

lricho

06-03-2003, 04:47 AM

I position the whole rig at the start of my sequence using a parent null, but then leave that in place and animate everything else separately around the world. It sorta just shifts the rig's origin, i spose. I dont use trax (maya's NLA) either (I havnt learnt how to, and cant b bothered to at the moment) so I am probably making things hard for myself, but I then dont have repeating animation and have the option of changing sections of animation without killing any other parts.

benjii19

06-11-2003, 06:08 PM

Hey, I tend to move the character round the scene, whilst animating (one foot in front of the other kind of thing) I havent tried motionmixer yet to do a cycle and then just move the character null around. Is it hard, oh and I use lightwave too. Did a sneek today where I animated pretty much straight ahead, but for walks I tend to slide the heel null along the floor and then go back and make the heel lift up and rotate, and also move the root along for each step. Dunno If I'm doing it the best way but it seems to work for the moment. Once I figure out posting films on the net, and once I get some more practice Ill put some short tests up.

suggestions for whatever I wrote welcome.

ps. think im moving to motionbuilder once i learn it, real time animation is goona be a saviour, no more previews

ben

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