Walkcycle/stride\offset/deformation along path..problem

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with this offset-bone walkcycle.
I tried everything that seems logical but i didn´t get my walkcycle deform along a path.
sometimes it seemed to work…but then, something completely weird happened or the Character got ripped in pieces…or so.

i tried both techniques, the stride-method and the offset-bone method. Nothing seems to work.
I did play with the track settings of the armature, parenting to the Path and without, syncing the stride bone, syncing the Main-bone, modifying the walkcycle…and so on.
Maybe it´s just a problem with the orientation of the bones…i can´t see it.

Could somebody have a look at the files…-?

greetings,

Julien

http://mitglied.lycos.de/heijulien/dudewalkproblem.blend

http://mitglied.lycos.de/heijulien/dudewalkproblemoffset.blend

p.s. -i know it´s not the best rig but it´s just for testing purpose :stuck_out_tongue:

Well I needed to learn how to do this anyway … but from what I could find without reading long tutorials is that there is a better and easier way then either the the stride-method or the offset-bone method … This was introduced in 2.43 and I guess they call it Forward Cycling And Matching and you can find more information here : http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/walk-cycle-modifiers/ (BTW going though the release logs is a great way to learn Blender’s features) . And all you have to do is to type in the bone you want to use as the reference Offsetbone in the Transform Properties window under “Options” in the field "OffsBone: " in the NLA window .
You could use the stride bone (though for some reason it is not centered even in Edit Mode) but I found that if you use a centered bone, like “Korpus” for example, for the Offsetbone and then parent it to the path in Pose Mode then your walkcycle works well . Just make sure you turn off the “Stride” option before you do this .
That should fix your first file .

And the second one looks like you kind of did do the above but like I said you for some reason didn’t center the stride bone and the animation looks kind of weird because of that … I think maybe you thought that this was the old stride method ? … Well just do the same as above (make the Korpus bone the offsetbone and parent it to the path, but before you do that remove the “stride” bone modifier in the Transform Properties window in the NLA and unparent the curve from the armature) . The resulting animation is a little jerky but I don’t think that has anything to do with the NLA walkcycle . You should be able to fix that with adjusting the walkcycle/ adjusting the speed of the path etc.
The “Add Modifier” button as far as I can tell (from the second example blend from the release log page) is to add additional motions into a walkcycle using other bones in the armature … which is why in your second file the figure was walking side ways after a few steps … Go to the release log page above, there is advice on how to correctly set up paths for this function .

And BTW your armature is rotated at 90 degrees to the Front View (i.e. it’s up axis is Y) and your mesh is not (it’s up is Z) … You might want to Ctrl-A (apply scale/rotation) to you armature in Object Mode . Though this will mean you will have to unparent/reparent your mesh and possibly have to re assign vertex groups … Usually this causes a host of problems but in your case just using the offsetbone method from above will get it to work .

EDIT : Also you might want to use the X-Axis mirror function in the Armature panel . Just Shift-E when extruding from the center - it will automatically name left/right bones for you and X-axis mirror them when you need to edit … a great time saver when you have an armature more complex then your example …

Wow, thank you very much.
These are really helpfull thoughts and i will try to realize them.
thanks :slight_smile: