Issues with walking animation.

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hey again! I’ve gotten some great help on this forum in the past, and I’m back for more.

I’ve only recently gotten in to modeling, rigging, and animations. It’s only been two days.
I created a fairly nice human figure and have set it up with an armature as would be expected. It seems to work well enough for something I made without much trouble.

When I tried to give him a (very simple) walking animation, his left leg jerks around strangely. I can’t continue until I get this ironed out. Is the rigging bad in some way, or is there something I don’t understand about keyframes yet?

Here is the .blend file for you to look at. http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=36683144499404672810

#2

Try removing or redoing the shin’s key frames.

#3

Okay…

select your shin bone…

and scrub through your animation one frame at a time using your arrow keys on your key board…

as the animation approaches the offending frame… 15… looks like then notice in your transform panel (right hand tool bar) in the quarternion rotations… your ‘w’ value suddenly goes into the negitive zone for no good reason…

I’m going to say that the reason your getting negitive values in the ‘w’ is because you don’t have enough bend in the knee when you set up your Aramture in edit mode…

I think a quick fix is to copy the WXYZ values from the other leg in frame 10 to the offending leg in frame 20 …

then of coarse do a Right click on the transform panel key frames and pick “replace keyframes”

#4

Thanks for your suggestion, but I doubt that that was the problem because the legs, as far as I can tell, are symmetrical. Any way, I wound up just doing the thing from scratch, so to speak, just by deleting keyframes for the offending limb and adding new keyframse with corrected poses where the incorrect ones are.

#5

Thanks for your suggestion, but I doubt that that was the problem because the legs, as far as I can tell, are symmetrical

My suggestion was for both legs to have a bit more knee bend… not just one leg and not the other…
But you have it correct that I that at least a bit of reworking or redoing of the keyframes was inorder…

Plus note that on the 3D window > bottom tool bar > on the far right > when your in pose mode with bones > are 3 copy and paste buttons… (little clipboard Icons) a copy button… a paste button… and a copy mirrored button (that is perfect for walk cycles because it will copy what you’ve already animated on one leg or arm bone to the opposite leg or arm… except mirrored… (on X-axis) so it makes quick work out of doing walk cycles…

also note… that the knee and elbow joints rarely need a Quarternion 4 variable treatment… in your case… XYZ Euler on that knee and then lock off Y and Z… that helps with flipping problems… you only need Quarternion Rotations in places like the hips and shoulders…

there are many situations where a joints to decides to flip…
but there is only one ‘reason’ for it to do so… it has hit the top of it’s mathmatical limit where 360* flips over to 0*…
the only solution for this is you have to help the computer under stand which way you want it to resolve the rotation… either by adding more degrees or subtracting more degrees…

this is even true with Quarternions (cept you don’t use degrees)