True… but that would be less important if the characters were fairly similar. In other words, an ogre vs a child would be radically different… but a man and a woman character of roughly the same size wouldn’t be very different at all… right?
I can see something that would require a contact position on a hip being off… but I guess I don’t understand the comment on a walk cycle. Whether I am 3 feet tall or 8 feet tall… my foot contacts the ground at the same place, doesn’t it?
Read from page 102 onwards of Richard Williams’ book. To my mind, the answer is no.
Apart from that, the whole idea seems to come from the notion of avoiding animation; precisely the opposite of what this rig is designed to do.
However, once it’s released CC, you’re free to do what you want.
Yes. I agree on this point.
Ha… You have a point… but isn’t this the “Law of Unintended Consequence” in action…?
The walk cycle of a man and a woman are VERY different, mainly due to differing anatomy of the hips which affect the movements of the entire rest of the body.
Not necessarily. As with most things, 90% of your time is going to be spent on the last 10% of the work (i.e. tweaking). In my experience, cutting out the time before tweaking doesn’t save much time at all.
Not if your proportions are different. For example, shorter legs carrying more weight will have necessarily less space between foot contacts.
Excellent point, Fweeb. I’m just starting down the road to learning animation in Blender, so I didn’t think of that.
Even the swing of the arms would be off. For instance, if the animation originated on a tall character, any shorter character the motions were applied to might end up with its hands waving above its head. I guess the motion library would have to scale along with the Cookie Flexrig (dare I coin the accronym: BCFR? Or does CFR sound better?) and mesh which would definitely be a challenge code-wise. Not impossible, but a challenge…
You’d have to calculate the stride of the character, the arc of the arm swing, the girth of the waist as well as neck length, body length and overall height. These could be done based on where various bones start and end while in the T-pose, the radius of a specific set of points around the waist in the mesh and other factors.
From there, it would be a matter of finding these factors for the character on which the motion was originally done and scaling up or down from there. It might mean dealing with some kinky math, but it wouldn’t be impossible. I’m sure there are things I’m overlooking in my visualization/analysis, but I can’t think of any real deal-breakers. Anyone else?
The scale of the transform space of the feet is determined by foot size. Or, in other words, the stride length is going to be relative to the foot size. So it may work out for characters that have similar foot sizes relative to their bodies. But a walk cycle built with medium-sized feet is not going to transfer well to a character with large or small feet (the relative stride length will be huge or tiny, respectively).
Trying to tweak finished animation to that extent is a huge pain in the ass, in my experience. It’s usually more efficient to start over from scratch.
Having said that, though, I do think that re-using stock animaiton can be really useful for e.g. background characters, where you just need there to be a sense of motion and people doing things in the background. But for primary characters, it’s best to create animations specifically for them.
It would be awesome if the rig works with the bge.
I have just got my download of this… it looks really great… only have been through the first few tutorials thus far… but I am completely convinced we need to have a ‘crazy dance’ contest in the NLA…
not to derail,but cessen when are you planning to release your next rigging dvd and what are you covering? would be a nice compliment to this series.
Question on some of the animation tutorials… (I’m currenlty working through the eye blinks…) what are we animating on? 24 fps? 30fps? if it was meantioned I missed it… Thanks for any reply on this…
Never mind… I see that in the tutorials, that in the upper left hand corner there reads reads a frame rate at 24fps…
My plan is to wait for the next lull in my freelance work, and then put together a KickStarter to fund it. I’m not entirely sure when that lull will happen, however.
My plan is to cover deformations. Then the two DVD’s together will be a comprehensive training for rigging basics.
Any chance you’ll ever put something out that covers weight painting and corrective shape keys/helper bones? That’s an area I seriously struggled with for a LONG time, and I’m still sure I don’t do everything as efficiently as I could.
Would it be covering the same territory as the second mammoth rigging video (deformations + weighting + corrective shape keys) on cmiVFX, except with a more recent version of Blender?
@Cessen… in Chapter_3 video 4 you go over story boarding… I was looking at your copy of MyPaint… it seems that you have some add-ons or ‘Extra’ tools on the top tool bar… I was wondering what was up with that… Does MyPaint have some add ons?
By the way… I’m learning as much about MyPaint as I am about Blender… you should do a tutorial or two from the MyPaint guys too…
That is an important part of deformations. So yes, it would be included.
That would be part of what I cover, yes. However, there are much better tools for weight painting now, and thus my techniques have changed quite a lot. I will also be covering quite a few other things (mesh deform, lattices, hopefully soft bodies, etc.).
Anyway, enough about this! You’ll find out more when I get around to the Kick Starter. 
Back on topic!
I build MyPaint from their git repository. Maybe that’s what’s going on? I haven’t added anything, it’s just a straight build.
@Cessen… Chapter 3 Video 7… “Waiter v.s. Death” while blocking out the Old man you put together a Hand Grab Rigg… I had built one of these with all bones in blender a while back that seemed to work okay (I didin’t have any problem with it then…) but your saying it can cause some Cyclic Dependencies?
Also… Let me get strait how you put this together…
You make a “Bowl” Empty… The bowl Empty is then made the Parent of the Bowl Object (or is the Bowl Object constrained?)… Then… you make 2 Hand Empties… Each Parented to the Bowl Empty… then the IK hand bones of each hand is Constained to the Hand Empties, via Location and Rotation Constraints… you then Animate the “influnce” on these to have the hands “let go” of the Bowl… The Bowl Empty ends up being the Object that gets animated…
Am I missing anything in all that? Thanks guy… Great work as always…
@ Cessen … again… sorry to be buggin you so much… Chapter 3 video 7… where your making an Empty to Follow the Waiters FK hand… I’m having some trouble getting the Bowl to Parent to the Empty… it’s like Blender won’t let me do that for some reason… I Created the Empty then set the 2 constraints to it… then I can’t seem to parent anything to that empty after that…