Walk cycle speed

[Christian]

Ive put a walk cycle onto a path, but I wanted to adjust the speed.

 

I tried increasing the 'chor length' and 'cycle length'. I think thats what they are called. Anyway, that was great for slowing it down, but when I tried to speed it up again, this time by reducing those parameters I lost part of the cycle. ie, part was truncated.. then my character slides the remainder of the path, where once, he walked..

 

Do I really have to be so linear in my work-flow? Im sure theres a way to change the speed without this problem.

[luckbat]

Does your walk cycle have a stride length?

[KenH]

If you speed up the walk cycle, you need to increase the number of cycles....because they're taking less time to complete. You can do this in the channel editor of the timeline. There are red boxes beside the actions. Also, in the properties, there's a repeat number option.

[Christian]

Yep, Im using stride length.

 

I couldnt see any option for number of repeats the last time I looked. I selected the walk action in the chor, then looked over at the properties box. Ill look again. By 'red box' do you mean the long red 'bars' that you can scale? I tried grabbing and scaling that, but again, its only good for slowing the walk down. If I try and shrink it again, the length of each individual stride stays the same speed, so it just truncates the action, not speeding it up. grr..

[luckbat]

That's why I asked if you were using stride length. KenH's advice makes no sense if you are, since the length of the cycle depends on the distance walked--it's not user-configurable.

 

In other words, if you have a stride length of 18 inches, and you want your character to walk 180 inches, then your character will do 10 walk cycles. No more, no less. Of course, you can change the duration of the walk to whatever you like.

 

What's throwing you off is the walk action's Ease property, which is what controls the character's progress along the path. It needs to be at 0% at the beginning of the walk and 100% at the end of the walk, with linear interpretation in between. This is what it defaults to, of course, but if you fiddle with the walk action length, those Ease keyframes get shifted around. You'll need to reset them to their new start and endpoints as you make changes to the walk action.

[Christian]

Sorry about the slow reply, I dont have a fixed internet connection. The ease control is exactly what I was looking for. I can adjust the pace of the movement just by moving the final key forward or backwards in time, and moreover, the characters feet stay planted firmly as before. Thanks guys!