Physically moving a character

# 1 21-07-2005 , 07:07 AM

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Join Date: Apr 2005

Posts: 3

Hello everyone. I created a walk cycle and now I want to physically move the character. Right now, it looks like the model is walking on a treadmill.

One suggestion is to create the walk cycle and parent that to another object ( like a sphere), then you translate the object. The upside is that you get a smooth walk. You can even attach the sphere to a motion path. The downside is the sliding feet.

Another suggestion is to physically move the character by translating its joints and other controls. The sliding feet is eliminated but it will take a long time to create a walk. Also, the walk may not look as smooth as the walk cycle.

My questions are:
Which method do you experience animators use?
If you use either methods, how do you overcome the problems?
If you don't use either of them, what technique works for you?

Thanks for reading my post.

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# 2 21-07-2005 , 11:43 AM

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Join Date: Dec 2004

Posts: 30

Interesting. So far the only thing I've used Maya (PLE) for is a UT2004 game model, and I had the opposite situation. I needed to turn a walk move into a treadmill version.

I started by making a regular walk sequence with a full step for each foot, allowing the character to actually travel the distance. This made it easy for me to see that the steps taken were the same distance, the feet really were anchored, and that the character's weighting would look good enough.

I had two foot controls and a root bone for the skeleton. The controls weren't parented to the root, so the feet stayed in place when I moved the root (and threrefore the rest of the model). I put the root and both controls into a group and then created a character set for that group. (The character set is optional depending on what you're doing. I needed it to create a clip that I could export to the game.) Then I animated that "platform" character set backwards the same distance as the character walked forward. Instant treadmill!

So you might try putting all your root elements into a group and then moving the group along the desired path.

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# 3 28-07-2005 , 06:32 PM

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Join Date: May 2005

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Posts: 599

Grab your root joint (all the joints are parented one way or another to it, so if u move it, u move all the others) and translate it.

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