OK, so I'm trying some new animation stuff in Poser, and my motions are smooth from keyframe to keyframe; however, my character's feet keep rising above, or sinking below the floor! Each of my keyframes has the feet on the ground. I tried turning IK on for the legs, but then when my character did her back-flip, her legs got all tangled up in odd and painful ways. Thanks for any help!

You might try this ... Go through your animation 1 frame at a time and do a "Drop to floor" for each frame. cheers, dr geep ;=]

if you're using propack or poser5 there's a python script that brings your figure back down to earth, it's called DropFigToFloorAllFrames.py, it's hidden in the pythonposerscriptsutility folder.

I'm on Poser 5. I'll have to check it out. Haven't worked with Python scripting yet. Something new to learn! Thanks for the info. Hopefully the script will let me identify frames, or else my leaps will look like death throws }-)

Sounds like a classic example of spline interpolation... You will probably have to add a few keyframes in the intermediate areas to keep the figure on the ground or change the type of interpolation for these keyframes. Ed

If any of the frames are highlighted along the "body" lined of squares, select that square and then hit the minus button. Sse if that helps.... Scarab

Just a thought, in P5, could you set the ground (and feet or character) as a collision objects so the feet don't pass through the floor?

Does sound like your basic application for collision detection. In P4 you could just set a "Break Spline" each time a foot hits the floor.

Attached Link: http://keindesign.de/stefan/poser.html

I figured out how to get my figures to stay planted without resorting to python scripts and such. It's not perfect by any means since it requires the animation to be run with IK on, which imposes some limitations. But for an animation sequence where you want to keep the feet planted throughout, it works fine.

Imagine you want a figure to do a kind of shimmying dance (moving his/her torso, arms, head, etc around but keeping his/her feet planted in one place). Now, here are the steps I take:

1. Create the basic movements you want, using IK on for the legs or just brute-force posing the legs and feet to go close to where you want them to be during the animation.

2. Save your file so you can get back to this point if something goes wrong.

3. Go the frame 1 and hit ctrl-D to drop your character to the floor.

4. Turn on IK for the legs only.

5. Open the animation pallette (shft+ctrl+V)and scroll down until you get to buttock, thigh, shin, foot, and toe (both right and left) for your figure.

6. Use your cursor to select ALL keyframes for those figure elements (i.e., buttock, thigh, shin, foot, and toe -- both right and left) for frames 2 through the end of the animation. You should see a white box around the keyframes.

7. Press delete. (That's right, delete them! As long as IK for the legs is on, a new set will be generated which keep the feet planted on the floor, though you may not see the new frames in the animation pallette until you turn off IK.)

As long as IK for the legs is left on, the figure will now do his/her moves with the feet staying planted. If you turn IK off, the feet will stay CLOSE to planted --and may be better than the original animation esp. if brute-force posing is used to position the legs and feet-- but they will revert to moving slightly. But as long as IK is on, you should get the result you want.

Now, everyone do the shimmy!

Good luck...

Hi Stewer, I tried the link to the Python script on your page, but got a missing page error. I think you have the best solution proposed so far, since I don't necessarily want my feet to be locked in the Y-plane, but instead to not drop through the floor. I can cope with feet that lift slightly when shuffling or sliding, but I want to be able to walk or jump as well. I'll try your link again later. Again, thanks to all of you for your responses and shared wisdom.

OK...I should update that link, it still points to my expired .mac account. I'll have it updated as soon as I find the script on my harddrive...