I have no idea. Has anyone else had messed up results from following that book?
[Introducing Character Animation]
So far I think there has to be some typos or miss matched details. This one in particular
is the result I got from following Chapter 9. Specifically the parts about following a
path with a stride bone.
Also, I don’t mean to sound crazy, but I am not going to upload the blend file for
various reason. :eyebrowlift:
Yes, 
I had all lot’s of these, me too…
I’m a very beginner in Blender, and meet lots of surprises.
Blender (but 3d in general) can have very psychotic issues. What is done first and what’s done next often create gory effects when inverted…
Have you real followed the step by step process (i mean realy point to point)?
Any Axis directions that don’t fit?
Softbodies envolved?
Many things can happen.
When things like your example happen to me, i usualy keep the original (messed up) file and work on a copy of it. After few hours, some issues get fixed and i can compare the files to watch closer to the differences… it often helps a lot to understand what was wrong and it a good way for a better integration of new knowledge.
But of course, i hope that someone comes up here and gives you an immediat help.
Good luck!
Yeah. So far my experience with this book has been time consuming and disappointing.
I definitely am not smack talking Blender Foundation so don’t get me wrong. I just
think maybe there are some typos in the book that misguide those with little animation
experience, like me. Possibly they use thw wrong terms or say to parent thing a certain way, but
meant to say another way.
I have been carefully re-reading paragraphs and taking things slowly, step by step.
I just want things to work like the book says they will.
The hard point when someone writes a guide, is the difficulty to put oneself in the skin of a non-skilled. Many features are approached as if already some skill or expressions where already perfectly integrated… But don’t forget that lots of people contribute for free to Blender’s.
For example, i once intended to buy Maya. I only could afford buying the books. They really well done, beautifully… but they costed me over 200$ ($ was 15% higher then).
So i guess there a lot to improve by oneself and i found, with Blender’s community, quite a few very helping people in the forums. This is also an added value to consider.
Hope you’ll find all the needed patience and tenacity all along the path of your creativity.
I love and respect the people of the Blender community. Also, I love what
Blender Foundation is doing for people. I don’t think I’d have a chance at learning
animation if it weren’t for these people. So let that be clear also.
I just want to know if I am the only one having issues with this book or not. Because
if I am the only one, then I think there is something wrong with my computer and the
way it handles Blender. Actually, both the iBook G4 and MacBookPro Intel Core
2 Duo
For example: Spin, Spin Dup, and Screw do nothing when I click the, except give me a “wrong window”
message. It works on my PC, but the Macs I am having trouble with.
Even though the platform differences, I have had problems with results from following this book on both
Mac and PC.
In a few months when I figure everything out, I’m going to come back to these threads and laugh at myself.
Is your book “The Essential Blender” edited by Roland Hess in 2007?
As i said… hard for people who have lots skills and habits to pass over their knowledge to others… More on online tuts. Yet i always need a writen material book to verify stuff…
And because there is no button to be pressed to correct any “not-in-sync” orientation and you may have no idea which bone-constraint is the wrong one …
the only way i can suggest is to start with a really simple setup, use only an armature with one to two bones.
You need only one bone, if you want to do the walking-by-offset in the nla-stip-properties (maybe only in one direction or following a curve-path).
Additional bones are only necessary to test the combination with more animation parts.
If you make the tests with one bone, you will soon notice that the orientation of this bone and the combined modifier is not trivial, both orientations have to be in “sync” (same rotation). You can limit the combination to some axis, but this makes only sense for some more complicated animation, not to understand the basics.
If you’re talking about Tony Mullen’s book, Sybex maintains an errata page where they publish corrections for typos. Most first editions contain typos these days, especially books about quickly evolving software. The access instructions are on page xviii.
I got Tony Mullen’s book recently, and it is meant for a good cause whoever edited it must have been high or something. Sometimes the instructions point to the wrong figures! btw Ch. 9 is the NLA editor.
I haven’t read Tony’s book either … But as test-dr said the problem that you are experiencing is something very basic and really has nothing to do with the stride bone … Most likely your armature in Object Mode is rotated 90 degrees to the view (Y up and not Z up) and when you set the stride bone to follow the path which is properly aligned you get the crappy results you got …
And since you already have keys on your armature the easiest way to fix this for now is to clear the rotation on the armature, clear the parenting between it and the mesh, rotate the mesh to follow the armature on it’s “back” relative to the views and apply the rotation to the mesh and then reparent the mesh and select the “Don’t Create Groups” option when reparenting, then you need to add an empty from the top view and then parent your armature to the empty and just rotate the empty 90 degrees so that it aligns to the viewports/hotkeys … And you need to in this situation to parent everything used in animation with regards to the armature to the rotated empty including the path used with the stride bone …
… Yet… some sort of “sync rotations and axis” button would be a nice gift to see coming in Blender! But maybe this sort of “feature” is impossible to automate?
PS Also puzzling: why adding Empty from “Top view”? Is the Empty “turned” as “local” object and not as “world” object by default?
Wow. Thanks everybody for all the feedback on this issue. It sounds like there’s
no easy fix. I will try everything you all have mentioned and hopefully find the solution.
And then I can start making those award winning animations.
I will come back and post what happens. For now, I might not be back here for a
week. I have to fly in to Nashville to help out with a concert for my job.
It’s probably going to be hectic with a lots of pressure to get things done
right.
I will be eager to get back to this though.
Thanks again. I hope all of you have a sweet awesome day.
If there is no easy fix, then I’d just apply the rotation to ensure the armature’s local orientation is the same as the global orientation (not rotated 90°) You can do this kind of stuff fairly easy without needing to re-rig the character, by just removing and re-adding the armature modifier.
By the way, it may be accidental, but that is one funky animation. 
and yes, there are a number of typo’s and misdirections in that book. It’s title states it’s an introduction though, not an “advanced” thing. It covers most of the basics, and that’s it.
as to 2.45, everything is added relative to the view you have active, so if you add something in front view, it will be rotated 90°, if you add it it the 3D view, it will have the rotation you are looking at etc.
By creating everything in the top view, you avoid this issue.
Or to be certain, just clear a rotation as soon as you create something (Alt R)
I see… But it’s quite hard to create a caracters bones system from the top view… Isn’t it?
And this is just one example amongst dozens, i guess…
I believe you simply have to add the first bone in top view. Once created, the object’s local axis is set, and you can move the bone into position, or extrude new bones, in any view you like.
The best advice is to turn on axis lables when working with bones.
Thanks Orinoco.
Isn’t also some “Turn all bones Z up” command around? Was searching for it the other day but went lost in the pannels labyrinth…
Turn all bones Z up
well, sort of. There’s a bit of discussion on this topic in Bone Roll Angles and Joint Deformation (link in my sig).
The best solution imho is to upload the blend and let other people see if they can help you. Your error could have many causes - I got a similar one when I forgot to parent the mesh to the bones and tried to do it later; which was then too late.
I then simply parented it to the armature as an Object (instead of parenting it to every bone - you can choose in this case: Parent to Bones/Parent to Object) which worked well. Maybe this does it for you, too. Try unparenting it by pressing Alt-P and then reparent with Ctrl-P.
Good luck and try to fix the error yourself. You’ll learn a lot.
Thanks
Real great! It’s bookmarked!
I guess I am just one of those people that learn the hard way most of the time.
It stinks because I made a bunch of actions, strung them together in the NLA timeline
(they looked completely fine), but everything turned to poop when I started doing stuff with
the stride bone and parenting with the curve path.
I’ll figure it out. There are so many things I need to become aware of in this precess.
I like the idea of modeling in Blender, exporting OBJ files and then rigging them in
Poser for animation. It seems much less complicated…but I really want to stick
with Blender. Especailly if I ever ended up creating something above average.
I’d want it to give recognition to Blender Foundation.