Animation for you all
 

this is a playblast of my characters run cycle (run, not walk :))
theres sumthing wrong with it, but i have no idea what it is, anyone know?
any comments would be appreciated :) be honest please :D

Nice Bear. as far as the run I think the trouble your having is in the keys you set for the feet. Its seems from your play blast that the feet dont really stick to the floor. As one foot takes a step the other should stay planted until the root starts moving over the the front foot as is makes its next step. In your play blast the back foot moves forward before the front foot has made its full step.
Try making your foot control Keys clamped and make sure when the bear is in mid step his back foot and his front foot are still planted on the ground. Also try making the arms move at the same speed as the feet. The feet look like they are moving twice as fast as the arms. One last thing, add a bit of rotation to the hips and shoulders, have him move up and down a bit more.

Hope my sugestions will help.


Kurt

Couldn´t have said it better myself. Take notes Nem, Kurt just gave you the whole deal. :D

nice work so far nem.. you're gettin' there.. :p

thx all :)
erm, what does keeping my keys clamped mean? and how would i do it?
its hard to add rotation to the shoulders as hes running cos if i do itll look totally freaky and wud look like hes shaking his breasts lol thats if he had any

Clamped keys are keys that tell the foot control animation to stop at a certain point and not move or slip as the other parts of the body move. I think your foot keys are made up of spline keys, your animation on the feet look like he was floating or skiding across the ground.

To hopefully fix the problem go to your maya window go to window-Animation Editors - Graph Editor. Once the graph editor is up select only the foot controls for both the left and right feet and select thoughs keys in the right window. In the graph editor window go Tangents-and Select Clamped. Now if you keyed your feet correctly when you play back your animation the feet should stick to the ground as one foot makes his step then the other will follow only after the first foot has finished.

Hope its not too confusing, would be so much easier to understand if I could show you.

PS.. Try adding some rotation and up and down even though you think it might look funny it should actually make it more realistic.

Kurt

when i clamp the keys, it turns them in spline like keys, but some of them i need to b linear for it to look as "good" as it does now
ive added some rotation and more frequent bounces in his run, it looks better now, but i think his head turns too much
heres a vid of him with the rotation and with clamped feet, tell me what u think, it looks weird with the clamp cos theres a stop in his step which takes away any fluidity there was? the stop doesnt look like a run

looking great Nem!!! As far as the stop in his step thats normal even when you run. If it looks still to much like a walk you can scale the keys down in the time line and play a little bit with the shape of the graphe editor lines.

If you scale the keys just make sure you have all the nodes in the hypergraphe select so when you scale it all the Keys scale at the same time and will speed up your whole animation. You can also add a bit of sway left to right as he steps too.

Really comming along Bud

Kurt

ive never understood how to scale keys down?

Scaling keys is pretty easy all you do is make sure all your joints are selected in the hypergraphe then move your cursor to the time line press and hold the shift key and hit and hold the left mouse botton and move the mouse to the right. If you did it correctly a red line will form in the time slider. Now in the red area you will see little black arrows. The middle ones are for moving the keys around and the out side ones are for scaling. With your animation if you want to speed it up, click on the arrow on the right not the middle right one and move it over to the left. That should scale them down an make your animation a bit faster.

Kurt

im sorry, but thats the most confusing thing ever :S im not talking bout ur explanation, its just how to use it, i dont get it :(

Nem: another way you can do it is by selecting the keys directly in the graph editor and using the scale key (with shift held down) and scaleing them normally (with the r key). if you want to scale everything that is animated in one go and find it a pain in the ass to go through and select each object in the outliner to get the anim curves up in the graph editor then you can use the attached script that automatically selects all the animated attributes in a scene.

understood! but ive found another way, think someone mentioned it earlier, options box for scale tool in graph editor, set start and end times :D
thx for the script btw kal, not had much use for it yet as its a pretty simple scene :) but ya no
so its all nice and nice, attached the animation so far, speeded it up cos its a run, the other one looked like a walk, but tehre still looks like theres sumthing wrong? hmm
what yall think? be honest :)

heres a very quick and simple run for you to look at - I've just done the legs/pelvis because theyre really the most important part to get right. should give you a better idea of the timing for the y movement (and also that both feet are off the ground at the same time which is the main thing that makes a run a run and not a walk)
hope this helps

wow, i like that kal :) how long did it take you?
but if you think about it, thats more of an adult type run, i wanna make it more child like