I have built my first character and he is ready to be animated for the most part, but im looking ahead and trying to think whats the best way to animate a character in motion across a scene would be.
The first thing that comes to mind is a motion path, but then you have to animate the legs to match the pace of the body, and if you decide you want him to speed up it breaks down the whole animation, unless of course you go in and adjust the curves for the leg animation to speed up or slow down, but that seems like a pretty involved process only to learn that you actually did want him to walk slower... so that one seems a little difficult.
The next idea i had was creating a character in the trax editor and doing different walk/run cycles, but this runs into problems as well, if im creating clips for a walk cycle, the IK groups that im animating are in the same relative positions, so when i apply that to the moving root joint, the root will move but the IK will keep the legs trapped to the spot where the walk cycle is being executed. But lets say that the IK groups not following the root joint isnt a problem. Im still confined to the 2 or 3 different leg cycles that i built, which i imagine would come off very boring in an animation of a decent length.
For an example lets say i had a foot ball player running to score a touchdown, dodgeing the other players down the field in a unique way every time he gets by someone. Whats the best way to set something like this up? have the character jumping around back and forth, up and down, but still maintain the control to change individual elements of the animation without having to redo the entire thing.
thats a lot i know, but if anyone can give a general explanation, or point me in the direction of a good tutorial that would be great. if you read that whole post im proud of you! : )