Foot Slipping During Movement Cycles

[Domarius]

Now that the search animation is relative to the origin bone, I have a problem with foot slipping, that I've been trying to sort out for 3 hours...

 

The foot makes contact with the ground. You put a key frame on it. You want it to stay there while the body moves forward. So when the hips move forward (taking the foot with it, since it's a child) you move it back where it made contact with the ground, and put a key frame on it. So it should stay on the ground in the same spot whilst the body moves forward, right? Fucking NO. It does some weird arse slide forward and backward again between the two points, still starting and finishing in the same spot, but with a wierd slip forward and backwards in between...

 

Adding "correctional" key frames to keep it still, winds up with you pretty much putting a key frame on every frame, and yet it still seems to wobble unsteadily, and this is a brutal, hacky, messy solution, that will be a nightmare to edit if I ever want to change the animation.

 

Opening the FCurves window to see if the bezier curves are causing some problems doesn't seem to help. I've set those keyframes to be flat (no curves for the movement, for translation and rotation) and they still do it!

 

There has got to be an easy solution to get feet to stop slipping. I've been reading about some arcane solution involving override clips or something, that I can't quite understand yet... surely there's some easy way to say "between these two keyframes, keep the foot HERE no matter what"?

 

I'm going to post on CG Talk...

*edit*

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php...472#post4141472

I also posted links to example anims there.

[Solis]

If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, all you have to do is go to the first keyframe where the foot is supposed to first touch the ground, and in the Dynamic Editor window hit the button that looks like a blue line falling to the right, and then go to the keyframe where the foot should stop being locked to the ground and hit the button that looks like a red line rising from the left, and it will completely avoid any smoothing between the two keyframes (which is what we want for this, since it's supposed to look like it's firmly attached to the ground). Make sure there are no keyframes between those two points. That should modify the bezier curve directly and avoid any smoothing whatsoever, since it seems like something isn't being applied the way you're flattening the keyframes out now.

 

The lines in the Dynamic Editor panel will still look like they have some curving to them even when the blue/red buttons are used, but you can just ignore those since in the actual animation it will be entirely ridged.

[Domarius]

Good news: It's working!

Bad news: I'm a fucking moron.

 

I already know that trick, and I tried it SOO many times, but I did it again just so I can honestly say I did, and yes it's working now.

 

You know what? No more working at 3am, I must have been forgetting to key the frame after I made the change Actually I think I've always thought it modifies the keyframe directly, and only changes in the posing window need to be "keyed" to make them permanent. Guess not!

 

...thanks for your reply

 

If any one wants me I'll be in my room. *goes and hides under the covers*

[Solis]

Haha...uhh...ok then...glad you got it working!

 

And yes, the "non-autoing keyframe" messes me up sometimes too, I'm used to Lightwave 5.6 behavior where it always automatically makes a keyframe whenever you've made a change.

 

Oh, and to save some headaches later for anyone that uses the autokeyframe option and doesn't know this, if you use the undo command, it will NOT automatically set the keyframe for what you've undone. So you must still manually set a keyframe (or delete the keyframe if it made a new one from what you did) when you use the undo command or make another modification to that bone (which will automatically make a keyframe), if you don't then it will revert to how it was before you did the undo option since that's the last time it automatically set a keyframe (which happens automatically when you slide to a different frame).

[Domarius]

Yes, it's a funny logic, when it comes to the undo...

 

Basically any changes are not permanent until you key them. Okay that's easy enough to learn.

 

But for some reason this includes pressing Undo - you still have to key what it "undid" to. Whereas in every program, undo takes you back in time in terms of the changes you made.