Hi, recently I’ve been working on a project to get one of my first animations done with blender (Woohoo!), and I’ve been running into a lot of issues that I’ve had to resolve through helpful online resources. With this issue however, I’ve been having extreme difficulty and I’m not sure how to approach it even after spending an extensive period of time experimenting and searching for help online.
My Problem: I have a basic rig set up as shown in the image below. Most of the parenting is setup as default however, the biggest problem I’ve been running into is with the feet of the character. I managed to figure out how to use IK to allow me to move the main body without moving the location of the feet however, this can only be done while adjusting the rotation of the attached bones. Based on the way I want the character to react I’d prefer if, while dragging the main body up and down, the section just above the feet extended to compensate rather than just bending to a longer position and being restricted. Hopefully this description is helpful enough otherwise I will definitely try to provide some videos or something.
Here are a few pictures showing what is happening vs. what I want to happen:
https://flic.kr/s/aHskCLqrDv
Here is my blend file:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/42623
The reason I’m trying to set this up, is to be able to easily animate various walking behaviors for this character. Currently, because the body moves up and down while this character walks, it’s hard to do simple walking patterns because the behavior isn’t as linear. I’ve had to animate the legs moving and subsequently match the bodies movements to match this which is difficult because of having stuttering in his movement actions (which I would prefer to keep). Below is a URL to a rendering of a walking scene that I’ve already created.
I have managed to get some simple actions setup such as taking a step, which I figured I can edit in f-curve editor by simply displacing the initial frame to where the previous one ended. So far creating actions like this, which are reusable, seems to be my “easiest” option.
Any guidance whether it be an already existing post, guide, video or any additional advice is greatly appreciated!
Thank you so much for taking your time to read this.
