Hey Blender people. Some people here may know I am learning blender but was a longtime user of Carrara. My learning is going fine and am becoming comfortable animating the basics in blender (keyframing,NLA etc.) but I have an issue. I created my own character and rigged him in blender and can animate a walk cycle. Next I try to animate or rough out a more complex scene with the character moving around the scene. I have IK targets for the feet and I can control the feet fine for the first part of the animation but after a while the IK target bones go crazy. I try to rotate the feet and the feet rotate the wrong way, the IK targets become unusable. I think it happens when the character walks on an angle , I try to rotate the IK foot target several times and targets become progressively more uncontrollable. Does anyone know if there is a fix for this or am I doing something wrong.

I'm not sure I've ever seen or heard of this in terms of a bug, but it might help to know which version of Blender you are using here specifically.

I'm not sure I understand the issue fully. Are you saying the rotations start to go berserk after a certain rotational degree? When you set up the rig, did you parent the IK targets with Make Parent > Keep Offsets? It's important that your targets were parented with Keep Offsets.

Otherwise, it's really impossible to say what could be going wrong here. There could be literally a dozen things about the armature setup causing issues. I've never experienced anything like this yet, and I've been working with my own rigs in animation for quite a while now. However, if it is a bug, it will help to know the version because it's probably been fixed in later versions.

Hey , I am using Blender 2.90.1 and I will try to explain a little more clearly the problem. I can't remember about using "keep offsets" but I am pretty sure I did. I usually animate from the Side View and also use the Front and Top views as helper views. The rigged character is perpendicular(90deg) to the Side,Front and Top views. Here is a step by step .

1. I animate the walk of the character straight forward. Everything works perfect, IK Targets for feet work great.
2. I used an NLA clip for the walk forward and also add Path Constraint.
3. New NLA clip, I then animate the figure turning 110deg to the left. I start animating the figure moving forward at 110deg from step #1 above.
4. I try to change the 3d view so I am looking at my character as close as possible to planar side view so I can rotate the bones properly.
5. After doing this I notice the IK bones acting a little strange .
6. After doing a few more steps the IK bones become very erratic. I will try again from scratch to find out more about this issue. I also have another character rig(Mike_Rig) I downloaded from the web that I can test with to see if this shows up with it. I just find it easier to animate with my rig which is why I used my rig.

Just a note on my above steps or an addition .

Step 4a. In creating the walk I copied all my bones for my pass pose, then I "pasted X flipped" to create the next pass pose quicker. After doing this my character position gets moved quite a ways from the position where I copied the pose, this is unusual. I have to move the character a long ways to the new position.

After doing this the IK Target bones start to go wonky.

Post this over at Blender Artists. I'd be interested to see what they think there. Honestly, I'd really need to see your .blend file and play with it myself to figure out what's going on here. It's difficult for me to ascertain the issue from your description. Is there any way you can share the .blend file of the character and rig?

I can post the blend file , maybe I will do this later. I did try the same animation using the Mike_Rig I downloaded from the internet, here is the video showing what I animated with my rig. I didn't encounter the problem with the wonky rotating of the feet controls, so I think it is my rig.

The animation of what I am trying to do that causes the issue.

If you wanted to look at it here is the blend file . Just go to the end of the animation and try to rotate the feet using the IK Targets. The Blend File

Ok, I downloaded your file but I only had time to give it a quick look. I didn't see much wrong with your rig at first glance, aside from a strange placement of the elbow poles in the armature, but that wouldn't cause the issues. I'll have to give it a better look when I have some time, but nothing jumps out at me.

I will say though that you do have some other geometry in the scene that could give you trouble when rendering. You have a lot of Z-fighting on the ground planes, and that park bench has a few inverted normals at the bottom. The ground plane in particular might give you some artifacts or flicker in areas where the polygons are overlapping.

Luxxeon, Thanks for looking at it . Regarding the ground plane , I wasn't worried about the artifacts/flickering at this point as I was just working on the animation. I took a look at the Rigify Add-on and figured out how to use it for my characters so I should be able to eliminate the "Rig" as the cause unless there is a bug in the Rigify rig.

I really don't think it's an issue with the rig. I think it's something to do with the NLA, but I could be wrong. The only thing I noticed with your animation is if I add a new keyframe in the timeline with the IK controller, it will freeze in that spot. I think it's because you can't really mix regular timeline keyframes with NLA strips in that way. I haven't tried editing your NLA actions yet. I don't really do much with NLA strips, except if I want to share some actions with other people. I've been using the Animation Layers addon, which seems to do a better job layering actions.

Hey LuxXeon, Yes, I have been struggling with blender in that it doesn't seem to allow Keyframing and NLA strips at the same time. I seemed to make progress in "editing " the NLA clips and re keyframing the existing clips to make new NLA strips. So, what you say very well could be true that it is a problem with the NLA strips. somewhere.
I think you have to disable all NLA strips then you can Keyframe a new animation , save out the new animation to a new NLA strip, turn on all the NLA strips in the NLA editor then add your new NLA clip.

Hey , I am getting used to how to animate in Blender's NLA Editor/ Action Editor/ Dope Sheet. IN this little animation I used a walk cycle NLA clip several times as well as created new NLA clips along the way. I found a few interesting things in Blender that helped out in controlling how things went.

1. If you have the Time Scrubber in the NLA Editor on the last frame of the NLA Clip then when you go to the Action Editor the Pose is the same as the last frame of the NLA clip in the NLA editor. This is a great starting point for your creating the next NLA clip.
2. Also the Pose library is very useful. If you copy the each main Poses of your Walk Cycle without the Root Location to the Pose Library you can then create a new walk cycle anywhere in the scene by just picking the Pose from the Library. This solves a couple problems I was having. Here is a simple animation.

Little Animation

Yeah, I use the Pose library quite frequently as well. I rarely use the NLA Editor though. I'm sure it's very useful for most character animation purposes, but ever since finding the Animation Layers addon, I've been saving a lot of time by using mocap data and then just tweaking the results with Animation Layers. I've found it provides very predictable and easily editable results. I expect that we will see some native implementation of it in future releases of Blender. Probably as part of the NLA Editor system actually.

Hey LuxXeon, I looked at the Animation Layers add-on you mentioned, looks like what I expected an NLA system to do. Blender's NLA system seems clunky or counterintuitive, I hope blender gets this functionality soon.
I did some more animating to my little animation and I think it is getting better because I can really feel the heaviness of the ball he carries which is a good sign. Here is the animation.

mmoir posted at 2:38PM Sat, 20 February 2021 - #4413457

Hey LuxXeon, I looked at the Animation Layers add-on you mentioned, looks like what I expected an NLA system to do. Blender's NLA system seems clunky or counterintuitive, I hope blender gets this functionality soon.
I did some more animating to my little animation and I think it is getting better because I can really feel the heaviness of the ball he carries which is a good sign. Here is the animation.

Looks good. I like the timing for the jump motion and you gave it the illusion of weight/gravity, which works well. Yes, the Animation Layers addon, in my opinion, does a much better job at blending or tweaking motion than the NLA Editor. In fact, there's a video of someone showing the differences and how each system affects the motion curves in the graph editor. Animation Layers does a cleaner and more predictable job at layering motions, especially when you wish to combine keyframed motion with mocap, or clean up a bvh or fbx motion with manual keyframes. It really needs to be included into Blender as a native tool.