I'm trying to create walk animations that can be used with the Walk Designer (both P4 and P5). When I look in the .pz2 files of the stock walk animations, I find the commands "thighLength" and "distanceBetweenFeet". I guess these commands/keys tell the WalkDesigner how to move the figure, but I can't figure out what the values mean. Maybe Haigan knows how to do it: his "cat walk" animation pose works fine with the Walk Designer. Please help me out. svdl

Hmm. Never noticed those before. After a bit of experimentation: The P5 standard walk poses also include a hipHeight number. The P4 executable apparently doesn't read that one. The values look about right when I measure them in Poser units; the distanceBetweenFeet appears to be the width of the "track" from center to center, not the length of stride. Changing the values doesn't seem to affect the action when the PZ2 is used as a regular animated pose, so they must be exclusively for the Walk Designer. Maybe Schlabber would know more?

Well I wasn't going to ask, but since you brought it up... I've been laboriously hand animating the Wolf, because there are only bipedal walks in the designer. I actually tried, with some success, modifying a run with limited arm swing in the walk designer and then applying it to the Wolf. Hind legs were not bad, but of course the forelegs were laughable. I thought I would just re-do them across the timeline and it would save at least 50% of the work. However, the overall speed seemed too slow for a Wolf, so I just returned to the hand method. Is this something that a Python script would be capable of doing? Sounds like there are some variables available that could be manipulated. I saw a post from someone requesting a way to animate the horse as well, so this might be a good way to expand the walk designer to include our 4-legged friends. Or, if anyone knows of a pre-existing walk that can be used, I'd appreciate the link. I found a ?BVH? or BHV file in the free stuff here at Renderosity, but have not yet learned what to do with it.

Poser uses BVH files easily. Just find File:Import:BVH on the main menu and bring in the BVH file. It behaves like an animated Pose file. One problem: This is a "hard-wired" method. The figure has to be placed just right at the start, and there's no clear way to tell if it's set up wrong. You just have to try each of the axis directions. But if the available BVH was made for a similar figure, it should work well. Python is harder but more flexible for this purpose. If you manually set up the position for one side of a step, you can automate nicely with Python. For a canine, I think the best method would be to use IK and move the paws mainly forward. The advantage of using a script is that you can set the speed (steps per frame) more easily, and you can control the interpolation more precisely than with BVH.