DT walk cycles question.

#1

Hi all,

Im currently in the middle of the DT Animating walk cycles DVD. Ive run into some animation issues. At first I thought it was just me, but after I did a capture of a right side of the final lesson that came with the tuts, I was able to see the problem.

[left]If you playback the final walk cycle - pay close attention to the knees. You’ll notice right around when the knees get lifted (between the down to the passing positions [f 6/26 ~ f 11/31]) the knees are jiggling.

I noticed the problem began right around lesson 11 when we start to animate the side to side position and rotation of the feet. I was able to straighten that out by experperimenting on one Fcurve at a time.

But what’s confusing me is that I was able to fix it by tweaking a different curve and controller on each foot (that’s POS Z for the R foot and ROT X on Left foot ROll controller).

Ive been told and Ive read some bad things about the DT tuts. Don’t get me wrong, Im not complaining or anything - I just cant understand why the walk was straightened out on 2 different controllers and fcurves.

I don’t want to run into this kind of issue when i animate another cycle later on. hope you guys can help me out.

Muchas Gracias!

J

[/left]

#2

i’m guessing that DT stands for digital tutors?
as in this dvd>>

http://www.digitaltutors.com/store/product.php?productid=2567&cat=46&page=1

#3

This is probably because either the animation or the rig aren’t perfectly symmetrical. Having perfectly symmetrical animation isn’t really important anyway. If you managed to fix it (just sounds like the leg IK popping which is a common issue to run into during walk cycles) then there isn’t really a problem.

#4

Best bit of advice anyone can give it to AVOID Digital Tutors For ANYTHING character animation or rigging related. I saw a post on XSI base that the 3dtutorial tutorials are going to be hosted on a site for free. They are old, but they are still MUCH better than anything you will get from Digital Tutors.

#5

do you have any actual information on just why you posted such a negative view for digital tutors rigging and animation dvd’s?

i have serveral dvd’s for zbrush and modeling in maya plus some 3dsmax vids on mental ray f rom digital tutors and they all appear to be well researched and well delivered.

#6

There’s a few people (customers of DT) who have a bit of a chip on the shoulders when it comes to the XSI training the company provides.
I have to second Sam’s opinion when it comes to the rigging one, I’ve had friends and colleagues trying them, and it took me more work and longer to undo the damage the dvd did than it would have taken for them to just learn the stuff themselves with some other software’s training and having to port it to xsi themselves.
It was an objectively speaking pretty embarassing product.

Other DVDs of theirs, particularly for other softwares, are definitely better products.

For more info you can probably look back for the same topic by searching this site, people have dissected (maybe excessively) the products in question a fair bit.

As for the original topic:
It’s kinda hard to tell without seeing the final result and the rigs.
Are they from DT too or are the rig yours? There are a number of things that can translate FCurves oddly, from badly buffered (or non buffered) transforms in the rig, to use of dangerous properties like static pose, all the way to simplier and more basic things like workflows and mis-understanding of the fcurve to viewport relation.

#7

i’m guessing that DT stands for digital tutors?
as in this dvd>>

Yep that one. :slight_smile:

Are they from DT too or are the rig yours?

nope, its from DT.

Just take a close look at the knees from the right view of the provided lesson 28.

Anyway, i didn’t mean to make a big deal out of this. the walk i modified is working for me, but I was just lucky to stumble on a better walk by messing around with the different Fcurves.

What matters to me at this point is to (like Jaco mentioned) is to dissect the situation further.

Love and Peace!

J

#8

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