Walk Cycle Maya Playblast Animation University of Kent

[SESIP333]

cool!! =D

[dmnxCGi]

did you parent the arm iks to the bicycle handles? would be nice if you can show the joints

[tomlaut1980]

No I used parent contraints for the arm IKs, by the way the skeleton is just the standard biped TSM rig.

The feet or Leg IKs are parent contrained to the pedals. The parent constrains are then switched off when he is walking, and when he is sitting on the bicycle the feet IK parent constrained is switched on and I keyed a control curve on the bicycle to rotate the pedals. I put a screenshot link into the info top right

[dmnxCGi]

thanks! btw i'm not actually animator, im more of a modeler/texturer, but i do animate characters once in a while if i need to. last time i rigged a char, had problem with the parent constraint on/off blending, the char supposed to grab an object with left hand and then the right hand followed on the other end (the object was a stick) i used parent constraints, not sure how i did wrong but the blending wasn't smooth got frame jumps like a sudden snap thing. i wonder if you got any quick tips?

[tomlaut1980]

Yep the blending often doesnt really work. I just switch off the FK/IK within one frame. So when I switch off the IK at frame 10 for instance I switch on the Fk at frame 11. All you need to do is try to reposition the FK arm at the same place where the IK handles where in the frame before. Might be unprofessional, but always works :)

[dmnxCGi]

i think i did something like, i manually keyframed some parts... after i gave up with the blending, and luckily it worked. anyway i've just been wondering all this time if there's actually something that i missed, apparently it seems that the rig method was a little problematic for that part i guess.... that time i couldnt figure out that one and the due date was just few days ahead. anyway thanks again,

cheers

[kangaroo1995]

Nice one, i'm downloading Maya right as we speak. (or, i type...) And i was wondering, to make a short 30 second - 1 min video with a few characters, would it take 5 hours or 5 days?

p.s. how long did this take you?

[tomlaut1980]

Really depends. I modeled and rigged the Skeleton as well, which took some days. I guess you already got your characters rigged and modeled?

In terms of animation that animation are just several walk and bicycle riding cycles attached to each other, so it will take less than a day to animate that. Also depends how much detail you want to put in, like facial animation etc. Really depends on the scene. :) Well I guess that sceleton took me less than 5 hours to animate.

[vicksups]

30 second - 1 min video ???

are you kidding?5hrs 5 days?

if u just want to animate then u can say 5 hrs..

but wen it comes  to ur own short,it will take not more than 3 months..

[tomlaut1980]

well modeling the skelton was a 3 week project at uni. I mean it takes some time to model all those bones. And then come rigging ... Its quite time consuming.

Also its hard to tell how many hours you actually work on a project. when your working your are not counting the hours all the time. I mean your not 24 hours a day commited to a project, after all you need some sleep as well :-)

[Atrain009]

Damn, nice job.

~Atrain