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# 1 09-02-2006 , 08:26 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 203

Making a character to walk from paint a to point b

Hi there all,
I got this project where I need to make a hallway long enough so that my character can walk for 25 seconds, then open a door, and then continue on walking through. However, the problem is that the hallway part is due first and then the character will be due latter. Therefore, I am having problems figuring out how long my hallway should be.

At first, I was thinking of making a dummy character, bone it, and then create a walk cycle which I have done so far. Now I am not sure how I am suppose to make the character to walk from the begining of the path to the door. I did a seach through simplymaya's forums, and the best 2 answers I could find were the following...

1. Try using the motion path. Howevr, nowhere did anyone explained what is suppose to be attached to the curve. So I tried both ways. First I tried attaching the root bone to the curve, but the program said that it couldn't attach the root bone to the curve because the root bone already had a translateX conntected somewhere else. So then, the last thing I tried was attaching the character group node to the curve, which it did attach, but the character didn't move.

2. Then in another thread, someone once said that you would need to make a clip, and then place the clip in the trax editor. In addition, this person also said that he/she only knew very little about using the trax editor, and all he/she could understand about it was from the book called Maya's Fundementals 5. Well, I have this book as well, and I tried watching the video as well as reading the book, but it doesn't explain much about this topic. Basically all it said was that first, you select all your keyable nodes. Next, you create a new clip, and then you will be able to paste that clip onto the trax editor, but that was all it said. However, I still tried do this by following the book's instructions, but the character still walked in place for 25 seconds like he is doing the MC Hammer dance.

So my question is, how do you get a character to walk from point a to point b?