Keyframing malaise, revisited

[someawfulbridge]

Allrighty--I've attached the project with the walk cycle-in-progress, and here is the really screwy thing that messes everything up. If you move one of the foot controls down in the y axis, even just one click, the whole foot control goes flying out and away--but this only happens on frame 20! Unhiding the knee controls, it looks like they're misbehaving--but just sometimes.

 

I am able to do a clumsy and still unreliable workaround by hitting frames 19 and 21 and then keyframing the resulting interpolation on frame 20, but that shouldn't be necessary.

 

Also, rendering the test choreography of him walking along a path doesn't render right. He walks correctly once, goose-steps about 4 - 4-1/2 times, and then slides around with a leg kicked out.

 

I'm using a quad-processor Mac with whatever the latest OSX iteration is. It's a powerful computer, so it shouldn't be a memory issue.

 

I recently upgraded from 13.0r to 13.0t, and I had none of these problems (with the same model, too) on 13.0r. Are these problems intrinsic to 13.0t? Is there a way I can find an old installer for 13.0r?

 

Something fundamental is misbehaving, and I hope it's something easily fixed that I did wrong, but the errors seem too inconsistent for comfort. Any help will be extraordinarily appreciated.

 

bataille.zip

[phatso]

Just a guess - not every motion spline shows up in the timeline; it would be too crowded to use. If you crack open each of the items in the animation part (bottom) of the workspace (click the triangle) you will see transforms. Click on those and look at the timeline to see if you've set keyframes you didn't intend to set. Remember, every time you move anytihing - even if you move it back - a keyframe is generated if there wasn't one already. This means you have to be mindful every second of where the timeline cursor is.

[robcat2075]

After a quick look, the problem seems to be your knee targets. they are down by the ground when they should be in front of the character. the knees are doing the best they can to point at them but that's going to be backwards sometimes where the targets are now.

 

Go to the modeling bones window and move them waaaayyyy in front of the feet. Just that made the walk cycle 100% better when I tried it.

[mtpeak2]

Ok, first thing, your knee targets are too low (knee height and out in front further).

 

Second (this is causing the problem), I noticed one of the knee targets was animated and one not. So I investigated, You have a foot controlR reference in the thighR smartskin relationship. delete this reference from the smartskin and the walk cycle works fine. I still would move the knee targets position in bones mode though.

[someawfulbridge]

You gents are gods among men. The simple fixes you mentioned did the trick.

 

Here is the finished walk cycle. He's just walking in place right now. I have to fine-tune his stride length. Since he comes down hard on his feet and the back foot kicks out and up a bit, I'm wrestling with getting the proper stride length to account for that.

 

But, in the meantime, I present Georges' latest movement:

 

georgeswalk.mov

 

Incidentally, his birthday is Monday. (Or would be, if he weren't all dead.) Happy birthday, Georges!

 

Thanks again for y'all's help!

 

Mark