Hello everyone:
I came up with a small add on to help design the blocking steps of animations. Having done a few walk cycles my self (mostly for games) i felt that there where certain steps that I always use in my workflow, and that could be simplified with a little bit of math.
The basic idea is that the blocking stage of a walk cycle is defined by the combined cyclic movements of a few bones; such movements in turn can be described by periodic functions, and such functions can be defined using F-Curve modifiers on specific chanels.
As usual, copy in add-ons folder and install in the preferences panel.
It is not intended to provide final animation *, but it can:
- Help to interactively design rough passes of a walk
- Quickly create cycles for background or extra characters
- Help study the mathematical relations of walking
- Who knows, maybe with some other parameters it can build run, sneak or even idle cycles.
*(actually, if you “insert keyframes” with step 0, you will have key frames only for the key poses (contact, down, pass, up…) of a regular walk cycle).
You can see it in action here:
and here for more details:
In any case, I hope you enjoy it.
The .py file is in :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2717774/WoM_Add_On_WORKS.py