Walking char animation tutorial

I have made this some time ago. Although it's not only B3D specific, it's a FAQ around here:
http://www.melog.ch/tutorial/walkcycle/

thats a good guide, I found it in google

Here you can see jfk's technique used to create a walkcycle in PaceMaker.

http://pacemakeranimation.net/tutorials/walkcycle.wmv
(10mb)

Whilst we're on the subject... here's some good ones...

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4402/humanoid/humanoid_walk_cycle.htm

http://www.erain.com/blog/archives/2004/08/introductory_wa_1.html

http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml

Now this is useful stuff!

Very useful tutorial jfk. I do have a question tho.

What you have created is sort of a skeleton i guess. How would you make a character that doesn't have the obvious joints, like the knee joints in your tutorial.

I guess what i'm saying is how do you "clothe" your model so that the model looks complete, not like a numebr of seperate limbs, but without affecting the animation?

Cheers

This depends on the tools you are using and the format you want to export. The tutorial is using dx7 compatible 3ds. that allows scale/move/rotate animations only. It doesn't matter if the leg is made of 2 boxes, or if you have modelled lower leg and upper leg as realistic highpoly models. The Pivots don't care about that, simply position them where they need to be. This Format requires every animatable part to be an individual mesh in the hierarchical structure (foot is child of lower leg, lower leg is child of upper leg, upper leg is child of waist...) the hierarchical linking is done from outside to the center, where the chest is usually the top parent.

The other format, B3D is capable of mesh deformation. You would create your model as one singe mesh, then add the bones to it, assign every vertex to one or more bones.

Then you can follow the same steps to animate it, simply use the bones instead of the pivots. There are some problems with joints, you have to prevent "folding" problems, so eg. a knee should be made of 3 bones, not only one.

In fact the term "bones" is misleading in this case, cause a bone has two ends, but a bone in a B3D file is actually a joint between two bones. As soon as you have connected two joints, there will be a hypotetical bone between them, hence the name.

thanks jfk. I think i will want to use the bones system. can you recommend any good,cheap/free tools to allow you add and animate a skeleton to a ready made mesh?

Cheers

Cant fragmotion do that?

Anyways fragmotion is awesome and only $30.

Ha! Didn't see this for 11 months :)

Yes, fragmotion, or CharacterFX, and imho the best of all:
Pacemaker.