Walker System is a character walk animation addon for Blender, it’s primary made to work with Rigify, but can be used on other rig systems.
In computer animation walk animation is usually done using walk cycle. It’s fast to make animation of character walking using this method, and it’s easy to set complex motions because we’re dealing with short loops. Downside of this method is foot sliding on the floor, which can be easily fixed if character is walking at constant rate, on straight path and flat ground.
Walker System expends walk cycle method with a solution that provides full control over feet and snapping of feet to the ground so it works fine on all paths or ground shapes.
This is something I made for my needs and I believe it’s a useful tool for every character animator. You can write here if having any questions or ideas about this addon.
Little explanation how system works. It’s quite simple.
During walk cycle foot is going up and down. This change in height can be used to predict key positions: Contact, Contact End and Up position.
Contact is detected first time when foot is equal or bellow 0 (or any value defined as contact height).
Contact End is detected first time when foot is above 0 and previous Contact position exists.
Up is detected by building up values to maximum height.
System require prerun to create control objects and create a log with these key positions and frame numbers when each key position occurs.
After prerun it uses common bone constraints to “snap” foot to control objects, changing target control object and constraint influence depending on current frame number.
This simplicity make this system quite versatile. It can be used with any rig, you can use linear or non-linear animation, put character on a path or not, even walk backwards… it doesn’t matter. Only thing it matters is feet ups and downs in local space
I made this script an open source and try to comment it well, so You can check it out, propose some improvements, etc…
I did some test and it worked ok, even with change of directions (forward-backward). It should work for every motion of IK foot controls with contacts and ups. Maybe some extreme runs on 4 frames (2 frame per leg) would produce issues, but to be honest, I didn’t test it on something like that.
Hi, I just bought the addon but don’t know how to make it work. Feet don’t move when I created the walker part. Is it possible to have a tutorial from the beginning please ? Thanks.
@JPblend
This addon doesn’t make any animation. It is designed to be used after creation of walk cycle to fix issues with foot when walking on curve path and leveled ground.
Anyway, I see it would be nice to provide some predefined walk cycles with this addon for some future release…
Sorry because misunderstanding, my intention isn’t to trick someone… it’s written in addon description: It doesn’t make a walk cycle, just fix problems with foot sliding when using a walk cycle on curved path and leveled ground.
Some things occurred to me, my life plans are changed, I’m not sure if I would continue with development of Walker.
Fortunately, I know a solution for knee pop. It usually happens if IK solver is confused how to bend joins. When making a character rig, avoid straight joins, always have at last a couple degrees of bending in knees. You can also use IK stretching of 0.1 for tight and shin bones, if using cartoonish character.
It’s in development, we are planning to complete some working version durring summer and release it for some smaller fee. First version will support Rigify and Mixamo. But at the moment we can not help You out with it.