Well, Namunger, that clears up a lot of things for me. A very informative demonstration which could easily be construed as a tutorial.

Thanks for taking the time to post. After reading your first response, I tried to do what you were talking about, but got nowhere. I attribute this to my lack of understanding of the software, not your explanation.

I think I can see a way to measure a character's step, but I'll have to experiment to see if it works. If I get anywhere with it, I'll post my results.

The only thing that doesn't seem to be dealt with in your demonstration is the rearward toe sinking into the floor as the character goes from the passing position into the next contact. But that's something built into the motion and not an oversight on your part. I'm thinking this issue can be addressed simply by tuning the cycle itself to keep the toe above ground.

I'll give that a try, too and if I get positive results, I'll post back here.

Again, thanks, Namunger.

And thanks to everyone else who took the time to jump into the discussion.

- Ron T.

Ron T,

I knew someone would have the answer.

sjonesdc :hehe:

STILL LEARNING!!!

Nice Job on the Tutorial! :cool: +1

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Here's my first try at recording and embedding a video. I hesitate to call it a "tutorial," since I don't really know what I'm doing. How about a "demonstration?"



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Now THAT is the kind of information I was looking for!

Thank you!

- Ron T.

OK, so if you're talking about feet sliding -along- the floor, rather than -through- it, it's not really a problem with the animation itself, it's a problem with the speed of the walk. What I do is to apply the walk animation, set my path, then tweak the end of the path until the feet seem planted on each step. Usually it comes down to shorter cycles to give more control. It took me a while to figure out that the character animation and the actual motion (or distance covered) have nothing to do with each other, and could be adjusted independently. Once that concept worked its' way through my thick skull, this whole animation thing started making sense!

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which in effect doesn't say much for the rest of the choices eh ? lol

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I agree with everything you said, except I think you are being too kind to the CMU library. :)

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
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@ RiViT , whatever is clever ! ;) basically iclone is pretty bare bones when it comes to keyframing, but there is a beauty in that, it makes the user pay more attention to detail and develop higher quality keyframing skills that don't depend on plug ins to fix - no short cuts lol. For the most part everyone tries to find bvh's from other sources that are already tight, such as the CMU library, but that is a labor of conversion a big one!. The advantages you will have with iclone is that you can create motions faster with less clicks, iclone does tween, and you can import vidoes easily and quickly to do your own tracing conveniently in contrast to the more expensive softwares, which it is a fabulous tool in that respect. But it does have it's weaknesses from promoting such simplicity, such as sliding feet and hands going through bodies... There are tricks around those bloops , one of which is to reset the keyframe start point and re - path the motion, meaning the character keeps moving, but you kill the forward path of the character and reset it with iclones path, which results in a much smoother walk.
This is also why the best option in general, is to use the iclone backstage motions as they are already tweaked to work smoothly in iclone with less work on the users behalf, but even then you may have to tweak them depending on how deformed your character is vs the character it was tweaked on with the developer.


for example, a short fat guy scratching his leg, may look like a tall skinny guy scratching his stomach. or reaching for a cell phone in a tall skinny guys pocket, may end up looking like a short fat guy trying to rip his heart out because the tall guys motion was made for longer arms / reach . there is no advanced algorhythm that retargets the motions to a new rig, .you have one rig that gets applied to all iclone standard characters ergo, tweaking is inevitable when using various sources.

ps - the new cartoon pack ad looks like that character is flipping the bird at me!! :crazy:

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Thanks for jumping in, Kurzal. Your reply makes me realize I need to clarify what I'm asking for...

I know how to do pose-to-pose animation on paper and in other 3D software. However, I have not been able to produce satisfying results in iClone.

So what this post is asking is this:

What step-by-step process did the animators use to produce the walk cycles for Cartoon Motion Vol. 1?
What software did they use (if not iClone)?
What were the workflow and procedure they used to avoid foot slippage?

I watched the video you posted, Kurzal, on how to keep the feet from sinking into the floor. Do you know of a similar procedure that would keep the feet from slipping?



- Ron T.