walking problem

#1

I have a problem with animating a walk. The character is shown below with the legs setup with IK handles. I can’t get the ‘legs’ to plant down on the floor ahead or behind the default position because whenever I move the legs forward or backward the feet rise up off the floor (as shown) making it impossible to make a walk cycle.

I could remove the ik handles and stretch the skeleton to the desired position but the rigs I have seen seem to be able to plant their feet ahead and behind the character to create a walk while still keeping ik handles attached. What am I missing here?

#2

If you are not doing a cartoon animation, legs do not stretch, so you need to move the hips downward to get enough length to plant the foot.

<* Wes *>

#3

Moving the hips and then moving the legs and then trying to reset them back to the proper place to do it again seems tedious. Is it really standard practice? The characters I’ve seen you can manipulate the leg to take whatever position you want in the walk cycle using only one control attached to the leg. I can’t figure out how to rig it to make it possible though

 ___1___2___3

0___1 ___2 ___3

I currently have an ik handle between joints 1 and 3. Is there something else to add? Something about moving the leg by clicking the ik handle on 3 and the joint 1 seperately seems wrong.

#4

Well, yes it is tedious. But you need more than just simple IK on a pair of legs if you want a unified solution. The IK you used just manages the leg bending.

Try using the FBIK or Human IK rigs… they will pull the hips along with the leg. Or there are a mess of other rigging systems people have made over at Creative Crash.

<* Wes *>

#5

Unfortunately the character is neither quadaped or biped. I’m trying to ‘animate’ the letter M with the skeleton like so

/ 1___2___3
0___1 ___2 ___3
\ 1___2___3

I thought with the simple skeleton it would be simple to get it to walk. But it seems that that there is no easy way to do it from scratch and searches on google or creative crash didn’t come up with anything.

#6

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.