I have an biped animal (a two legged dinosaur) and I am trying to use the "walk designer" to make it walk, but I am running into some problems. 1. I have created a walk path. 2. In the "walk designer" I click apply and then "follow path". Then when I click "ok" I get a message "No I.K. chains found on legs" 3. So I have read I can go to the menu and select (Figure > Use Inverse Kinematics) but when I can't select it because it's greyed out for some reason. Do you know why I can't select "Use Inverse Kinematics" from the menu?

In Addition to my last question, I have been manually animating my dinosaur by moving a limb, then a foot, then the torso and head and adding a keyframe after every movement, you get my drift, but there has to be a better way. I have been randomly guessing what to move next and I can't get the dino to move forward. Animating the legs to move forward is not working. My dino animation is not convincing. Are there any tricks or tips to making the dino walk properly and not take so long to do?

"Do you know why I can't select "Use Inverse Kinematics" from the menu?" It sounds like there are no ik chains for the legs in your figure. That's probably why it is greyed out. Even if you create them you may not be happy with the results the walk designer generates. (I'd suggest you create them anyway.) You might get better results by just creating your own walk cycles which you can then save as animated poses. You can do it with only two basic poses and using "symmetry" from the "figure" menu. A google on 'walk cycle 3d' or similar will probably point you in the right direction. Same principles will apply regardless the particular 3d app being used.

"I have been randomly guessing what to move next and I can't get the dino to move forward." It sounds like you haven't used hip x/y/z trans. Your dino will just walk in place if you don't.

You can load the dino into the SETUP room, and add a preexisting "skeleton" (i.e., one from another similarly postured creature). Following the appropriate steps, this should give you the IK chains you want. You may have to tweak the bones and adjust some of the fall off zones.

The dino I am using does have bones already. I guess I will have do more reading to figure this out. Thanks for the help. Tunesy, you said: It sounds like you haven't used hip x/y/z trans. Your dino will just walk in place if you don't. You might get better results by just creating your own walk cycles which you can then save as animated poses. You can do it with only two basic poses and using "symmetry" from the "figure" menu. Tunesy, Being new to Poser, I have never heard of either of these and didn't see them in the Poser manual. Are they in there?

I would suggest that first you make a walk cycle, using Walk Designer, with a standard figure (not the dino) since that exercise in itself will clear up several points for you better than I could explain them ;)

A 'walk cycle' is an animation (or 'animated pose' in Poser) representing one 'cycle' of a walk, e.g. left foot forward, right foot forward. You could think of it as an animation version of 'loops' in computer music or 'seamless textures' in 2d painting. It can be repeated as long as necessary to get your figure to where you want it to go, but you only need to actually create one cycle and then just repeat it. The Walk Designer in Poser will create them for you, basically, or you can create them manually. 'Walk Designer' is a feature specific to Poser. 'Walk cycle' is a generic term that applies to any 3d animation app capable of animating a figure walking.

Most (all?) Poser humanoid figures use the hip as the root bone. If you move (translate or 'trans' for short) the hip all other body parts follow. This is true only of the hip. You can use 'body' trans as well in a lot of cases, but if you're new to Poser I wouldn't worry about that for the moment. You must move the hip (or body) if you want your figure to do anything other than walk in place.

If you create a walk cycle via Walk Designer with a standard figure and then take a look at the hip x/y/z trans values as well as the hip x/y/z rot (rotation) values using the graph you'll probably stumble into a few 'ah-ha!' moments. (My walk cycles looked stale/robotic for a while because I was neglecting the importance of the hip rots involved.)

You mentioned that you're new to Poser. You might want to do a search on this forum for Dr. Geep tutorials as well as anything you can find on animation in Poser.

Message edited on: 05/29/2005 00:51

"Do you know why I can't select "Use Inverse Kinematics" from the menu?" You implied that the existing dino skeleton is lacking IK. My point was that by adding preconfigured bones to the dino, you might also get the Inverse Kinematics in the process. However, its only a supposition.

Message edited on: 05/29/2005 09:56