Towards Walk Paths for Props.

In some circumstances there are obvious advantages in using a Walk Path to animate a prop, if you don't believe me try recreating the attached animated gif without one.

I'm trying to learn a bit about Walk Paths and the Poser Walk Designer, I hope people will treat this thread as a place as a place the share information on the Walk Designer in genral, as well as just walk paths for props.

It occured to me that a prop could be made to follow a walk path if it was parented to the BODY of a figure, and the figures actors were hidden. It's a waste of resourses to use a normal figure for this purpose, so the question arrose "What are the minimal requirements for a figure to follow a walk path?".

Nothing is set in stone yet, but this is what my experiments so far sugest are the minimal reqirements.

Actors:
BODY
hip
rThigh:1
rShin:1
rFoot:1
Thigh:1
lShin:1
lFoot:1

It seems that all actors (except BODY) must have actual geometry, you can't use an empty declaratin or problems will occur with the Poser menus when Walk Designer is used. I used a square primitive for the geometery declaration in most parts, and the Mag Base (base.obj) for the hip. Poser insists that the file must also contain IK chains for the legs. My current version of the 'Walker' is about 29 KB (the Mannequin.cr2 is 108 KB).

All the actors in the walker are hidden, except for the hip which is, set to Outline and transparent so as not to show when rendered.

My main problem with the 'Walker' at the moment is that when I create a walk cycle in the Walk Designer the amount of Z translation of the BODY in each frame is not constant, it results in a jerky uneven motion. Any thoughts on correcting this would be much appreciated.

I will attached my WalkerV01.cr2 below in my next post, you may use it in any way you chose. One feature is that poses saved for it will include data for the root actor 'BODYX', so it is not necessary to save the walk path or a pz3 in order to recreate the motion, just save a pose file.