Why Animators Creating Walk/Run Cycles?
polycounter lvl 7
Hello polycount.
I started to learn some basic animation techniques. I watched some videos about character animation especially about walking and running characters. Everybody making running and walking cycles, I searched and I found something some people making this cycles for using it in game engines with programming languages. But I didn't find anything about how to use this walking/running cycles in 3Ds max or Maya.
Is there a chance to use these loops for a short animation project? and How can I use them?
Short question : How can I use animation cycles on a moving object? How can I move a character with that loop cycle?
I started to learn some basic animation techniques. I watched some videos about character animation especially about walking and running characters. Everybody making running and walking cycles, I searched and I found something some people making this cycles for using it in game engines with programming languages. But I didn't find anything about how to use this walking/running cycles in 3Ds max or Maya.
Is there a chance to use these loops for a short animation project? and How can I use them?
Short question : How can I use animation cycles on a moving object? How can I move a character with that loop cycle?
Replies
I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve here and I will try my best to explain thing as clearly as I can:
First of all are you trying to animate a walk/run animation to put it in a game engine to make your character move forward?
If yes there are roughly two ways of doing it:
_ it can be code( programming) driven. Basically you animate your character looping in place (no forward translation) and let code move the character in engine.
_ Or, it can be animation driven. In this case everything is driven by animation and you tell code to let the character follow the anim.
There is pros and cons to each method but the most common one in games are Code driven and sometimes a mix of both.
As far as the best way to move a character in 3Ds max/ Maya you can apply a animation layer on top of a looping/in place animation to make the character move forward in a non destructive way using the global control or a combination of pelvis/root conrol and feet control.
Finally, there is a ton of tutorial on Youtube on how to animate a character and put it in engine to make it move forward. I'm sure you've come across some of them bu if you want specific video, I can link you some stuff here.
Hope this was helpful to you, and If you have any more question, feel free to post over here.
Can you suggest a video for animation layers ?