Critical Mass :: 3D Action Puzzle Game

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Forum Index - Animation - Keyframing tips?

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-John West Minor
Junior Member
John West Minor

3 years ago
I can DO keyframing, but it's a horribly repetitive task and all of my animations look stiff.

I especially hate when I'm doing a walking animation and I have to keep moving the root object up and into the direction my character is walking for every frame between steps just to keep the foot on the floor in the same place (which is especially awkward when I'm not moving straight along the x,y axises).

I've found that if I make a small marker object, it's easy to get the foot in the right placement for each frame, but is there an overall easier way to do this?

(Yes, I have snapped my character to a biped object. No, the built in walking animation is not acceptable)

Any help is appreciated.


-Altopais
Member
Altopais

3 years ago
i'm not that much into animation, specialy caracter anim, but i think you can set up a path constrain on your walk cycles via simple spline, try google it, i remember reading something about it.
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-John West Minor
Junior Member
John West Minor

3 years ago
Path constraints are awesome, especially with cameras. But they're not exactly the easiest to work with in real time, and it's especially had to do subtle movements with them.

-Tyson
Senior Member
Tyson

3 years ago
Two options.

1.With character studio. If you create a looping on the spot walk cycle and copy the keys to make the character walk for your desired timeframe. Then add a new animation layer and select both feet and the centre of mass. then key the whole character moving forward with linear interpolation. You may need to adjust either the distance he travels or the speed of the steps to get it to look like he is making contact with the ground and not sliding.

2. create a walk cycle moving forward making sure to key all the tracks for the centre of mass. horizontal, verticle and rotation. even if it isnt going to rotate.
save it out as a bip. and load it into motion mixer as a clip. then you can loop them relative and play with time stretching etc..

Other than that you are probably up for some manual keyframing of the entire animation which is most probably going to be the best method as some fancy footwork is usually going to look better and more natural if you animate it straight ahead.
I always just remember that the 2d guys can't even preview it. at least we can see what our timing is going to look like at each point of the process.


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Critical Mass :: 3D Action Puzzle Game

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