New Walk-Cycle Help!

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi, some of you will probably want to hit me with a baseball bat for asking this question:o, seeing that it seems so obvious to most of you, but how does the new walk-cycle work?
(refering to: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Walk_Cycle_Modifiers.821.0.html )

Everyone seem to know what’s going on and are rather asking questions on what they are doing wrong than how to start/do it at all? Is there a tutorial/site that I’m missing, because I’ve searched everywhere!

Any light on this subject would be greatly appreciated!:smiley:

2

The link you posted along with the example files listed there and this thread :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=81488

… is pretty much all the documentation at the moment.

Mike

3

I haven’t worked it out yet either but these might help.

http://www.telusplanet.net/public/kugyelka/blender/tutorials/stride/stride.html

4

Those tutorials are for the “old” stride bone method and won’t help with the new features. … other than the fact that the NLA editor and action editor are still used.

Other differences :

  • The “Offsbone” field in the NLA properties is now used instead of the Stride Bone field

  • A “walk in place” motion can be made to work (with an FK foot rig), but it’s not as effiicent as an “IK foot rig” (like ManCandy, Ludwig, AJ, Bunny, Mouse , (links to those rigs in my signature “Best of Blender” threae)

There is also the Add Modiifer button / Chan: Ob: fields now for walking “along a path”, as well as using the Edit buttons / Object panel.

All those details are covered in the link to the other thread I posted.

Mike

5

http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_Dokumentation:_Offset_Bone_und_Deform_Modifier
OK, I’ll try and summarize it (since german is not so common).

  1. Create a step. Don’t make it in place, animate the natural movement foreward for one step (see image 1).
  2. Add an Action strip in the nla editor. Use the setup from image 2.

You’re done.

6

That’s a nice tutorial.

Even just running it through BabelFish translation made it fairly understandable. … Though … since I know the basics I may not be the best judge :slight_smile:

A couple of suggestions / things I’ve discovered :

  1. It’s no longer neccesary for the mouse to be over any particular area in the NLA window (as long as it is in the NLA window) for the "convert to strip SH-C to work.

  2. It’s very important that the Armature in Object mode have zeroed out rotations, and scale (CTR-A)

  3. If a path(s) is/are used it should not be scaled or moved in Object mode, … weird things happen (the path should be manipuated in EDIT mode.

Mike

7

Thanks a lot for all these answers! I’ve looked at all of them, but haven’t had the chance to try it out yet…will have a look at whether I am able to create the walk cycle, but I think these will be of great help and should be enough! Thanks for the tut, SoylentGreen! And thanks for the explanation, Mike_S (looking at the other forum, I would have thought that you have had your fair share of explaining the walk cycle, thanks for taking the time again to explain! :slight_smile: )