Walk cycle overlap switch?

[R Reynolds]

I'm working on my very first human walk cycle.

(My hat's off to anyone who gets a believable cycle without days (weeks?!) worth of tweaking.)

I have a vague memory that there used to be switch that compensated for the fact that the first and last frames of the cycle are identical. I don't remember what its name was and can't find a reference to anything like it. Is this still a thing?

[robcat2075]

Hi Roger,

I don't recall a switch but I think the key is to have the action "Length" equal to the time of the end-of-cycle keyframe that is a copy of the start-of-cycle keyframe.

That seems to work in this sample PRJ.

Robot05k2 egg .prj

If you are watching your cycle in in real time you will want your Play Range set to be no longer than your last frame. When I had a slower computer I think I had to set the Play Range one frame short but when I look at this project today it doesn't seem to need that.

 

[robcat2075]

On 6/5/2023 at 2:52 PM, R Reynolds said:

I'm working on my very first human walk cycle.

(My hat's off to anyone who gets a believable cycle without days (weeks?!) worth of tweaking.)

When I was taking AnimationMentor classes, there was a lecture that began with a montage of several studio animators each revealing what they dreaded animating most... walks! 

Convincing walks are hard to do and harder if you are doing a walk cycle. What ever is wrong with it becomes more obvious as the cycle repeats.

[R Reynolds]

Thanks for the comfort. I assume only a skilled artist could do a believable human walk without rotoscope references. I started with this Pixar mannequin. Its walk is a bit aggressive for my taste but it highlights the torso movement in a graphical way and it gave me the broad strokes. Its biggest downside was that it made me think that 24 frames was a sufficient cycle length. Once I got a quasi-workable left leg cycle I realized how wrong that was.

[robcat2075]

18 minutes ago, R Reynolds said:

 Its biggest downside was that it made me think that 24 frames was a sufficient cycle length. Once I got a quasi-workable left leg cycle I realized how wrong that was

You can bounding-box select your keyframes and stretch the cycle to any duration you want.

Also, a walk cycle on a path will scale its duration to traverse the path in the specified time.