How do you create a walk path for two different characters in the same scene. I tried to assign separate walk paths to two different characters but when I played it back character #2 just slid over to character #1's walk path. My question is how do you make each character stay on his on path, and for that matter what is the correct proceedure for placing two characters in the same scene?

I have Poser 6 Pro

When you apply a walk cycle to a figure, the figure will move to a position so that its hip and Body actors are above the start of the walk path. This hapens regardless of the figures position in the scene before the walk cycle was applied. So the walk paths need to be spatially seperated.

When you click 'Apply' in the Walk Designer, you will be presented with the 'ApplyWalkDialog' box. Here you can chose the figure to apply the walk to, and select which path the figure is to follow. See the image above, the box may look diffrent in your Poser version, but the principle is the same. 

To be continued...

Thank you

Your welcome.

...As I said, when the walk cycle is applied the figure will start the walk with its 'hip' and 'BODY' actors above the start of the walk path. The 'BODY' actor is an invisible actor that the hip actor is parented to. All actors in the figure - except the 'hip - are "fixed" to their parent, they can't be translated away from it, only rotated [this is not quite true, but an explination would go off topic]. The 'hip' is an exception, it can be translated away from its parent the 'BODY'.

With a figure selected, when you create a walk path it will load with its start directly under the 'BODY', but because the 'hip' may have been translated away from the 'BODY', it may not load under the body (no quote marks), if you get what I mean. It's a bit confusing because "BODY" has a technical meaning in Poser, where as "body" is just what we nornmally mean by the word.

To cut a long story short, if you want to translate a figure it is usually best practice to impliment X and Z translations in the 'BODY' actor, and to impliment Y translations in the hip. If you do it this way the walk path will always load where you expect it to load relitive to the selected figure. This is also good practice from the point of view of saving and applying poses. Poses saved or applied whilst the hip is translated can cause the figure to jump to a diffrent location in the scene.

Whilst we are on the subject of walk cycles and walk paths, here are a few handy facts.

A walk path can be saved to a Props pallet for future use.

You can add a node (aka "control point") to the path by clicking on it. If you hold down the Alt key whilst clicking a node on the path the node will be deleted.

There are two types of node (control point) in the path, nodes that are part of the path as walked, I call these "walk nodes", and the two end nodes which I call "tweaking nodes" for want of a better word. The tweaking nodes are used to set the angle of the curve at ends of the path.

You can make a straight path by deleting the two middle nodes from the default path, then aligning the two tweaking nodes. Another way to make the default path straight, is to turn down its 'xScale' in the paramiters pallet.

A walk cycle always makes the figure walk on the GROUND plain, here is how to make a figure walk above the GROUND. Apply the walk cycle as normal. In frame one load a Poser square primitive, in its Properties, set it to be invisible. From the Figure menu 'Set Figure Parent' to be the square. yTran the square to the desired hight, the figure will now walk at this hight. You can also use rotations and translations of the square to make the figure walk on a wall or ceiling. Only move the square in frame one, otherwise it will animate.

In a walk path saved as a pp2 (uncompressed prop) the nodes are represented by 'pt' lines, here as an example is the block of code that discribes a circular walk path:

 numControlPts  11
 pt 0.480000 0.000000 0.520000
 pt 0.000000 0.000000 0.800000
 pt -0.560000 0.000000 0.560000
 pt -0.800000 0.000000 0.000000
 pt -0.560000 0.000000 -0.560000
 pt 0.000000 0.000000 -0.800000
 pt 0.560000 0.000000 -0.560000
 pt 0.800000 0.000000 0.000000
 pt 0.560000 0.000000 0.560000
 pt 0.000000 0.000000 0.800000
 pt -0.480000 0.000000 0.520000
 calcCurve

Each 'pt' line defines a node, with the three numbers in each line being respectivly the X, Y, and Z coordinates in Poser Units.

Attached Link: High Heel Helper

Getting a figure to walk in heels, particularly high heels can be a problem. I created a special pose file for P6 and up, to help overcome this problem. See link above.

When a walk cycle is applied the overall motion of the figure is implimented in the BODY actor. As Pose files do not normally save pose data for the BODY acrtor, if you save a pose, the pose will only make the figure walk in place, it won't move forwards. You can overcome this limitation by creating a special figure, and doing a bit of text editing.

With Poser set to save uncompressed files, save a figure to a pallet with a new name. Open the resulting cr2 file in a text editor, use the editors Replace function to replace all instances of the string "BODY" with "BODYX". Resave the file.

Create your animated walk cycle poses using the new figure, the poses will include translations and rotations of the BODYX actor.

The resulting poses will only work on the new figure, but you can convert them to work on a normal figure by text editing the posed to replace "BODYX" with "BODY".

Many Thanks!!!