Learning to Walk

For years I have played with animating objects. It is fairly easy, (not to mention, quite amusing) to get an object from point “A” to point “B”. Depending on the object, it is often as easy as placing your object at the starting point, inserting a Key frame, moving ahead a few frames, move your object and add a new Key frame.

Yes, I’m aware that this is an extremely simple example, but you get the idea.

Now you could apply the above method to moving your character, but it is going to look very odd as the character flies across the Scene. Well unless you have a really big need for a character to fly across the Scene.

Animating characters is considerably more complicated. In fact I have come to the conclusion that teaching a character to walk is just about as hard as teaching a child.

Over the last several days, I have taken a rather serious look at moving characters from point “A” to point “B”. And typical of anything done in Blender, there seems to be as many ways to accomplish the task as there are blender users doing it.

My characters only have a short distance to walk, so the first method I tried was to just Key frame my way from point “A” to point “B”. I put some serious thought into it before I started. I planned out their respective paths and measured their strides. I placed planes of the correct size (each plane was a full step) along my “walk paths”. Then I set about key framing movement from plane to plane.

The theory being once that was done, I could go back and Key the legs and feet into the proper positions for the walk. In theory it should have worked, in practice it quickly became obvious that this would require way too much work. But it was something I could go back to if I couldn’t find a better solution.

Next came a two day flurry of research and testing of methods. Obviously a walk cycle would help considerably. So I created one, okay I actually created quite a few. But there was still the dilemma of how to move the character once the cycle was created.

I looked at the stride bone option (apparently now obsolete, but the option is still there), which I didn’t even understand well enough to attempt.

Then I tried parenting the armature to a path which kind of worked, but with two odd results.

1) My character followed the path, but the cycle didn’t play
2) The cycle played, but the character followed the path sideways.

Not exactly what I was going for. Scratch one more method.

So after two days of struggling to find a workable solution that I understood, I had pretty much decided that either:

1) I was changing my animation to no walking being shown pending further research, or
2) Going back to manually Key framing the whole thing.

Bummer!

Just as I was about to give up completely, I happened to glance over at my copy of the ManCandy FAQs DVD. I sat there and stared at the case trying to remember if Bassam only talked about rigging or had he covered animating walk cycles as well.

Five minutes later I had my answer! He covered walk cycles! yay!!

Bassam is officially my new hero.

He broke the cycle down into extremely easy to understand sections. So with one hand on the pause button (of my media player), I was able to quickly set up a two step forward cycle. Even better, once the cycle was set up Bassam then shows how to take the walk cycle into the NLA editor and by using a action modifier and a path, move your character about. It was about as painless as it could be. Nothing beats having someone walk you through a new task step by step.

Now both of my characters are walking about the scene. Hoo and Ray!

Quite honestly, if you haven’t seen the ManCandy FAQs DVD yet, I strongly encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience.

Now it is time to add in the non-walking parts of my animation. And of course the “Special effects”.

See ya all later.