Hello everyone,

I'm getting pretty comfortable with Poser animations for characters which are fixed in place. But I don't feel confident moving a character realistically. What I am trying to accomplish can't be accomplished in the Walk Designer (at least I don't think so).

In the animation I am working on, two people are kneeling on the floor in a living room picking up items. One character is to "walk" on their knees over to the other character to help out. It's a quick 10 second animation.

I'm struggling with getting it to look fairly fluid and realistic. How should I go about this? It's one thing to slide one knee out in front of the other, but I also need to move their full body forward too without making it look like they are floating/gliding.

Any beginner suggestions? Thanks!

Terri

Try searching "crawling bvh" or "crawl bvh" on Google?

A motion capture file like that might well be the way to go here? At least as a starting point...

e.g.

http://mrl.snu.ac.kr/~mdb/tag/crawl

How are you creating your sequence? Are you moving from one frame to the next or are you setting up keys and working backward and forward between them?

Determine how many frames your sequence needs first. You stated 10 seconds, so that is 240 frames, give or take. (10 seconds x 24 frames per second, where 24 is the average number of frames in 1 second of animation).

Establish your beginning pose and position in frame 1. Then establish your ending pose and position in frame 240.

This gives you a middle point of 120 for your mid-way pose and position.

Work back and forth at half-way points (ex: frame 60 and frame 180) each way until the animation feels right. You don't have to key every frame since the software will fill in the transitions for you. You should be able to leave gaps between every 10 frames or so, but scrub back and forth to make sure limbs aren't flying around in strange directions cause every software has a tendency to do that sometimes, all depends on the rigging.

Hope that helps give a starting point. Others can help fill you in on the graph editor (I never mess with it). 

(Edited cause I originally said 2400, cause I can't count)

~Shane 

Starting from a bvh, or some animated pose if one can find one, is certainly the way to go.

And fighting the gliding, or "figure-skating" as it is often referred to, is something we animators generally spend too much of our time on.

Make sure you have a good grasp of the different key frame types.  For example, you may want to use smooth interpolation for the figure's legs, but linear interpolation to actually advance the figure's body.

My first attempts at animating were horrible experiences of trying to handle over/undershoot by adding extra keys and wondering why Poser was moving things in ways I had never told it to.  Learning when to use linear interpolation, and how to get a piece to hold still made all of the difference in the world.  Don't attempt anything this complex if you don't understand how different interpolation types will affect the same set of key-frames.

My planned workflow was to move one knee forward, and then slide the hips forward with IK turned on for the legs. Yes, I agree the overall body movement should be linear with the individual parts perhaps being smoothed.

I literally tried this with a video camera recording me to try to get the speed of movement right.

BTW is there any affordable software which will allow me to create crude BVH from 2D video? Ie, not shot from 2 angles.

www.brekel.com - free software that uses the Kinnect camera. I haven't tried it, but I hear it can work, if a little flaky.

I'm sort of hoping that the next Poser update will include a really funky mocap feature (for this is the future)...

The Kinnect simply doesn't have the resolution to do any sort of acceptable mocap.

Usink IK you would move the hip forward a little remembering to twist it toward the weight bearing leg. Then adjust the foot forward and clean up the thigh bend.

Probably not suitable for this project, but interesting news on the low cost mocap front:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417167,00.asp?google_editors_picks=true