A different (however, more technical) workflow for getting "perfect, non-sliding feet" would be to constraint the feet at the step positions (after you finished the world position) and then key or bake them only for the range where they are supposed to be standing still. After that you can delete the constraint. That way only your pin positions are baked and the rest of your animation stays clean and easily editable. If you want to edit the pinned steps later you should edit them all at once in the graph or make an animation layer.
I've a simpler, engineer's way of doing it. I'm not an artist and I see my daughter struggling and gave her a simple idea based on the slope of the linear tangents. Here is the workflow 1. Make TZ for Right foot control Linear - So that Slope is constant. 2. Copy the parametric values to World Control - Use the Slope formula - (Y2-Y1)/(X2-X1). Here X-axis is the Frame numbers. 3. Check the Left Foot controls - ensuring TZ is linear tangent - and make that equal to the slope of World Control TZ value for the same frames. Thats it, there will be no slippage at all.
Why animate frame by frame on the Base layer ? There are so much keys and cleanup will be tedious. The proper and cleaner way is to work with layers. - On a layer, put a key on the foot on the first foot contact (the one where you explain that the curve should be linear). - Go to the last one and get the distance travelled in Z by the root from the first floor contact to this last one. - Substract this value to the foot's Z position. - Now, instead of multiple keys, you'll only have two on a layer. And your Base layer stays untouched. What you are doing frame by frame on the Base Layer is exactly like inversing the curve of the foot on a layer. To see what I mean, try to animate as you do frame by frame in a layer. You'll see that the resulting Z curve is the exact inverse of the Base layer curve.
you can use post infinity cycle with offset in the global controls and normal cycle in the local controls in the first method, and he will continue foward. then if you need to bake it, use smart bake
if you have the character moving forward in scene with no foot sliding, not animating the global... all you need to do is leave cycle on everything, just turn the objects that are translating in Z to Cycle with offset. so in this case, the foot platforms and the pelvis/COG
thx for sharing and thx to Mlle LAfortune for an other method. Using layers or not ... wouldn't it be simpler to adjust the distance over time that the root is traveling then adjusting the foot traveling distance? Like Lafortune pointed out using the foot's Z value to and multiply it by the distance u wanna walk. Coz u know ur foot travels that fare after 33frame then u can calculate the distance it will travel after 100 frames. But overall nice showcase of 2 methods of letting a char walk. Thx again
by mistake i pressed A on my keyboard and my character disappers and doesnt come back i have to create a new file again why does it happen and how to get back the character ? Can u help me with this isssue ?
@@asteuartw i tried earlier and i tried with camera settings also it ddnt work out in outliner . it shows ray which selects the whole character in outliner bt it ddnt workout . Well thanks . One more question if u can answer how much time does it takes to make a perfect walk cycle i tried mny times bt kuch na kuch prblm arhi what to do for that .
It takes a while. Follow the tutorials carefully, do them over and over again until it starts to come together. Getting good at animation takes months or years of practice.
You could measure the character's stride and move the master bone in increments of the stride length, that would make a perfect animation with no sliding feet. I don't use Maya, I use Blender 3D, though I was professionally trained on 3D Studio. The method I use is I create a master bone that is horizontally orientated and the master bone is the same length of the character's stride so it's easier to animate the walk cycle, and one the walk cycle is complete then I can simply move the entire armature in increments of the length of the master bone which is the same length of the character's stride and the feet don't slide at all, at least not while walking in a straight forward direction. I'm looking up tutorials on walk cycles and their application because I'm trying to do more advanced things like path constrained walk cycles, I'm not talking about having a character to simply follow a path, I'm talking about using constraint functions that will actually cause the character's feet to conform to the contours of the path for walking up and down inclines and around turns while keep the body upright and the character's center of balance where it realistically should be. The professional training I have in 3D Studio is from back in 1996, that's before the first Windows version of 3D Studio, the old DOS version, we didn't have bones, so we couldn't do walk cycles like this at all back then, bone existed as a plug-in, but the bones plug-in was damn expensive $1,500 USD, so my college didn't have it, they just had the base 3D Studio program $3,500 USD back then installed on 72 computers (36 for class rooms and 36 for the college's rendering farm), so that's 72 copies of 3D Studio at $3,500 each copy for a total of $252,000 USD, they weren't going to pay an additional $108,000 for us to be able to do bone animations, so that is something I was never trained to do. My former college also had 36 SGI (Silicon Graphics Ingine) computers (SGI Indigo 2 Computers $50,000 computers) with Alias (3D Modeling program) and Wavefront (3D Animation Program) installed on them ($40,000 animation programs used in many Hollywood movies), but those computers and that software was reserved for those majoring in Computer Animation, that wasn't my major, my major was Industrial Design, so I was stuck with 3D Studio. Wavefront had many more features built in that you had to buy separately for 3D Studio, so the Computer Animation student got training for bone and particle animations where as the Industrial Design students didn't get that training but 3D modeling and animation was required for both majors because Industrial Designers do architectural animations, mechanical animation, and they also do animated special effects for movies, on top of making movie miniature models, special effects makeup appliances, prop and set making, sort of the Jacks of all Trades; whereas the Computer Animation students only did animation and not necessarily for movie which was my focus in Industrial Design, yet they got the better computers and software. Though I had no training in Wavefront I did get to mess around with it between classes, it was a completely different thing altogether, even the Operating system. 3D Studio used DOS back then, and Wavefront used Unix. Around that time Alias merged with Wavefront and combine their software into a single program Alias/Wavefront and that merged version is what is now known as Maya, but back in the 90s it was called Alias/Wavefront.
Instead of moving each keys at the end to clean the animation, why don't you just copy the translate values while the feet doesn't move from the ground ? You'll be sure that it's not moving backward or forward at all no ?
No because the global controller is taking a movement. If you copy the same translation keys they'll slide, the idea is to make the keys sliding backward from the global controller to give the sensation that they are not moving at all. To resume, you should make the foot slide to see them not sliding
There are always multiple solutions to animation problems in Maya. I hope my videos are helpful - but of course you are free to find better and smarter ways to solve problems.
A different (however, more technical) workflow for getting "perfect, non-sliding feet" would be to constraint the feet at the step positions (after you finished the world position) and then key or bake them only for the range where they are supposed to be standing still. After that you can delete the constraint.
That way only your pin positions are baked and the rest of your animation stays clean and easily editable.
If you want to edit the pinned steps later you should edit them all at once in the graph or make an animation layer.
Yes, that would work too.
I've a simpler, engineer's way of doing it. I'm not an artist and I see my daughter struggling and gave her a simple idea based on the slope of the linear tangents. Here is the workflow
1. Make TZ for Right foot control Linear - So that Slope is constant.
2. Copy the parametric values to World Control - Use the Slope formula - (Y2-Y1)/(X2-X1). Here X-axis is the Frame numbers.
3. Check the Left Foot controls - ensuring TZ is linear tangent - and make that equal to the slope of World Control TZ value for the same frames.
Thats it, there will be no slippage at all.
Sounds good to me! Thanks for sharing it!
Why animate frame by frame on the Base layer ? There are so much keys and cleanup will be tedious. The proper and cleaner way is to work with layers.
- On a layer, put a key on the foot on the first foot contact (the one where you explain that the curve should be linear).
- Go to the last one and get the distance travelled in Z by the root from the first floor contact to this last one.
- Substract this value to the foot's Z position.
- Now, instead of multiple keys, you'll only have two on a layer. And your Base layer stays untouched.
What you are doing frame by frame on the Base Layer is exactly like inversing the curve of the foot on a layer. To see what I mean, try to animate as you do frame by frame in a layer. You'll see that the resulting Z curve is the exact inverse of the Base layer curve.
There are many ways to achieve the same outcome in Maya. Your method may be just as good - but I am less familiar with it. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'd be interested in looking into this method. Is there a link to a video?
woah, I didn’t understand a word of that because it’s too complicated for mi smol brain, but sounds nice lol
This helped more with me on learning how to make my character move from one side to another. Thanks for this.
glad to be of help!
you can use post infinity cycle with offset in the global controls and normal cycle in the local controls in the first method, and he will continue foward. then if you need to bake it, use smart bake
if you have the character moving forward in scene with no foot sliding, not animating the global... all you need to do is leave cycle on everything, just turn the objects that are translating in Z to Cycle with offset. so in this case, the foot platforms and the pelvis/COG
Yes, that works too.
thx for sharing and thx to Mlle LAfortune for an other method.
Using layers or not ... wouldn't it be simpler to adjust the distance over time that the root is traveling then adjusting the foot traveling distance? Like Lafortune pointed out using the foot's Z value to and multiply it by the distance u wanna walk. Coz u know ur foot travels that fare after 33frame then u can calculate the distance it will travel after 100 frames.
But overall nice showcase of 2 methods of letting a char walk. Thx again
Yes, you can do it that way. There are many workarounds in Maya.
by mistake i pressed A on my keyboard and my character disappers and doesnt come back i have to create a new file again why does it happen and how to get back the character ? Can u help me with this isssue ?
Go to windows/outliner and select your character in the outliner. Then press F in the viewport and your character will reappear. Hope this helps!
@@asteuartw i tried earlier and i tried with camera settings also it ddnt work out in outliner . it shows ray which selects the whole character in outliner bt it ddnt workout . Well thanks . One more question if u can answer how much time does it takes to make a perfect walk cycle i tried mny times bt kuch na kuch prblm arhi what to do for that .
It takes a while. Follow the tutorials carefully, do them over and over again until it starts to come together. Getting good at animation takes months or years of practice.
thatsa wierd mike wazowski
You could measure the character's stride and move the master bone in increments of the stride length, that would make a perfect animation with no sliding feet.
I don't use Maya, I use Blender 3D, though I was professionally trained on 3D Studio. The method I use is I create a master bone that is horizontally orientated and the master bone is the same length of the character's stride so it's easier to animate the walk cycle, and one the walk cycle is complete then I can simply move the entire armature in increments of the length of the master bone which is the same length of the character's stride and the feet don't slide at all, at least not while walking in a straight forward direction.
I'm looking up tutorials on walk cycles and their application because I'm trying to do more advanced things like path constrained walk cycles, I'm not talking about having a character to simply follow a path, I'm talking about using constraint functions that will actually cause the character's feet to conform to the contours of the path for walking up and down inclines and around turns while keep the body upright and the character's center of balance where it realistically should be.
The professional training I have in 3D Studio is from back in 1996, that's before the first Windows version of 3D Studio, the old DOS version, we didn't have bones, so we couldn't do walk cycles like this at all back then, bone existed as a plug-in, but the bones plug-in was damn expensive $1,500 USD, so my college didn't have it, they just had the base 3D Studio program $3,500 USD back then installed on 72 computers (36 for class rooms and 36 for the college's rendering farm), so that's 72 copies of 3D Studio at $3,500 each copy for a total of $252,000 USD, they weren't going to pay an additional $108,000 for us to be able to do bone animations, so that is something I was never trained to do.
My former college also had 36 SGI (Silicon Graphics Ingine) computers (SGI Indigo 2 Computers $50,000 computers) with Alias (3D Modeling program) and Wavefront (3D Animation Program) installed on them ($40,000 animation programs used in many Hollywood movies), but those computers and that software was reserved for those majoring in Computer Animation, that wasn't my major, my major was Industrial Design, so I was stuck with 3D Studio. Wavefront had many more features built in that you had to buy separately for 3D Studio, so the Computer Animation student got training for bone and particle animations where as the Industrial Design students didn't get that training but 3D modeling and animation was required for both majors because Industrial Designers do architectural animations, mechanical animation, and they also do animated special effects for movies, on top of making movie miniature models, special effects makeup appliances, prop and set making, sort of the Jacks of all Trades; whereas the Computer Animation students only did animation and not necessarily for movie which was my focus in Industrial Design, yet they got the better computers and software. Though I had no training in Wavefront I did get to mess around with it between classes, it was a completely different thing altogether, even the Operating system. 3D Studio used DOS back then, and Wavefront used Unix. Around that time Alias merged with Wavefront and combine their software into a single program Alias/Wavefront and that merged version is what is now known as Maya, but back in the 90s it was called Alias/Wavefront.
There are many ways of achieving the same goal. Thanks for the tips!
He sounds like Mike Seymour from fxphd
Are you related to Richard Williams?
Yes, his son.
Instead of moving each keys at the end to clean the animation, why don't you just copy the translate values while the feet doesn't move from the ground ? You'll be sure that it's not moving backward or forward at all no ?
i agree, just copy paste the translation value that have same feet position
No because the global controller is taking a movement. If you copy the same translation keys they'll slide, the idea is to make the keys sliding backward from the global controller to give the sensation that they are not moving at all.
To resume, you should make the foot slide to see them not sliding
thank you
Thank you for this!!!!!!!!!!!
mike wazowski
Don't bake, that is the worst way to do it. I'm an animation teacher.
There are always multiple solutions to animation problems in Maya. I hope my videos are helpful - but of course you are free to find better and smarter ways to solve problems.
Love you so much..
Why does it sound like you were in a bathroom?
'cause I'm recording these videos at home on a standard Mac Book Pro. Sorry for the poor sounds quality.