I’m trying to do what I thought would be simple… make a cube “walk” meaning it pivots on one bottom corner and then on another corner, back and forth, as if it were walking.
Any ideas on the best way to do this? I tried simple keyframing, and it works, but the corners slip a little bit. Maybe with an armature?
pull 4 legs down and make it walk like mine in my signature
Use the 3D cursor. There is a button at the bottom of your 3D view window which allows you to change rotations etc from median-point to 3D cursor, and if the later is selected, then the 3D cursor snapped to the corner will allow you to rotate / pivot the cube as if it were stepping from that point.
Sorry, kkrawal, it can’t have legs - must stay in its “cube” shape.
Lancer, yeah, that’s how I did it with keyframing… but it doesn’t repeat perfectly with cyclic extrapolation. Plus the corners slide a bit too (which they shouldn’t since I rotated on the 3D cursor, snapped perfectly to each vertex).
I may take this another direction and have the cube “jump” instead, like a bean-bag race. The corner-walking thing may be too slow of a movement anyways. The cube object is actually a fuel pump, located in a boxing ring, and I need to have it head to the other character some way or another, without it looking too cheesy.
I can kind of understand that the corners would in fact slide a little… you might need to touch up the animation curves in the IPO editor, which tends to try and smooth things out by default, hence the slide. Also, when you do any walkcycle, a good workflow is to do the contact positions first so the cube is shuffling its feet from along the ground. Only when you are happy with this do you go back to the inbetween frames and raise every other foot / corner position into the air for the “passing” position. At this point, you may find sliding occur due to some IPO curves needing to be sharpended at contact.
There are other things you can try. It might be that you want the corners of the cube to stretch a little (Disney style). The mesh stays as a basic cube, but you have a full leg-rig armature within.
If this is a set piece (e.g. not a generic character you’re likely to use for other shots) then I’d go with dropping the cycle altogether (too uniform… yawn snore every step the same) and make a simple zigzag rig which unfolds to create the walk.Basically, you have a bone from one corner foot to the other, but this is the last in a zigzag chain, which gets pressed together flat to come out something like the spring of a jack-in-the-box.