So I’m mostly just looking for general advice, but specific tutorials and such are always welcome.
I’m animating a character for a scene. Most of the scene is just the character walking through a tunnel, but I want to be able to add some other actions along the way.
I’ve watched a few different tutorials on creating walk cycles, and I’m still working on that. But, my question is about the next step. (haha)
The tutorials I’ve watched mostly end with just making things cyclic in the graph editor and moving the character at the right speed to match the steps. I’ve even seen one that actually walked along a curve, which was helpful but still not quite what I’m trying to do.
Just say I have my character walking, and I want them to stop and pick something up, but then keep walking. Is there a way to do that without copy/pasting the walk cycle key frames over and over?
This is what the NLA Editor is for. Check out some tutorials on it- you can have a walk action and a stop/pick up action, switching between them as needed
Ok, so I have the basic walk cycle and a few actions put together. The NLA editor is definitely what I was looking for here. The problem I’m having now is that it works fine on a flat surface, but the scene my character is walking in has some uneven ground. I’ve found a couple tutorials, and I have her walking on the ground by constraining her location/rotation to a plane that’s shrinkwrapped to the ground and clamped to a curve along it. This works pretty well, but her foot ends up sticking through in a few places. It’s not a lot, but it’s noticeable.
I’m hoping there’s a solution that’s more dynamic than editing every frame that’s off but that I also don’t have to pay for - one video suggested buying an add-on.
You can also add a shrinkwrap bone constraint directly to her feet–maybe conserving your animation by doing that via a new parent bone to each of the IK targets? (It’s a little dicier doing modifications to the rig after you already have animation in place.)
To be clear, that would mean more keys, turning the influence of the shrinkwrap on and off for each step–but it’s not quite as bad as every frame.
For anyone else looking, this tutorial answered my question almost exactly: