No "Ease" in Walk?

[KenH]

Hi, I'm in the middle of making a character walk. I've been following the manual to the letter on how to do stride lengths. I've done it and added my character to a path, however, it talks about an ease constraint in the walk properties....it's not in mine as you can see in the pic. How do I get it?

[Iham Wrong]

Add a path constraint from your character to the path. The ease is under the constraints properties.

[KenH]

Thanks Iham

[KenH]

Me again Do you know where I can find the Repeat option? I want to make him cycle more times over the same distance and time. It's not in the same place as the Ease as it shows in the manual.

[Randy]

When you are talking about having a character on a path, using an action that has stride length, there is no such thing as "Repeat". The number of times the action will cycle is dictated by dividing the length of the path by the length of the stride. Hence if the path is 100 feet long, and the characters stride is 2 feet (as set in the action), the action will repeat 50 times by the time the character reaches the end of the path.

 

The ease only controls how fast he gets to the end of the path. If you tell the character to get to the end of the path in 1000 frames, each cycle is going to take 20 frames.

 

Hope this helps,

Randy Croucher

[KenH]

Hi Randy

 

Hmm....you're right. I'm reading the 2002 manual and it also has it in the Animation Master:2002 book. It *was* there, so, it makes me wonder why it was taken out.

Anyway, thanks for the reply

[Iham Wrong]

Like Randy said. If you want to use the repeat action feature you will need to go back into the action and turn the stride length off. When you come back to the chor you can set or drag the action to repeat however you like. When you do this the feet will slide and the character will appear to be walking or running on ice. Are you working on an ice skating theme?

[Randy]

It's still there, we just hide it when the action has stride length in it. The type in that used to be there, never did anything and was useless when you had stride length in the action. If you do not wish to use stride length, you should turn it off in the action.

 

Randy

[KenH]

Right. I turned off "Has Stride length" and now I can see the "Repeat" option. If I read you right, the higher the Repeat number, the the more strides he will do. If so, I'm putting the Repeat up to 100 and he's not going any faster than when it's at 1.

Is it me or my machine?

[Randy]

Whether you use stride length or not, the speed at which he slides along the path is controled by the ease channel on the path constraint.

 

If the action has stride length, you are the one that specifes how many times to repeat the action, and how long each iteration should last. This method is very difficult to prevent "slipping", especially when there is a complicated ease channel.

 

If you use stride length, and have the length properly set, both of the above mentioned items are done for you once the model is applied to a path. There should never be any slipping. If there is, then stride length needs adjusted, and you need to make sure that when things (like feet) are in contact with the ground in the action, that they move back at the same rate as the stride grid is moving by.

 

Randy

[KenH]

Got you now I'm going to keep stride length on and adjust the positions of the markers. Thanks.