Here the second part of the series of tutorials to learn how to transform a cycle in place in a forward moving walk. Now we will see another method that can be used when you don't have a regular walk or if you have acceleration and accelerations on the steps or a complex path that doesn't go straight in a linear line or other cases where moving them in control as we've seen in the first video is not enough. We can use locators on the feet to stack them on the ground. So after you move the main control following the path you need, in this case you don't have to worry about the sliding of the feet and you can just translate the main without calculating the exact speed, because we will go to fix the slugging issues using one locator for each foot.
And you can also rotate the main control in order to change the walk direction. The reason why we do this is that it's impossible to manually lock the feet on the ground, because they move with the main control. And the method we have seen in the previous tutorial doesn't work in this case because we have too many variations of speed and direction in this walk. So we need to constrain the foot to an independent object, like a locator, that is not influenced by the main control movements. If we parent the feet to the locators that are stuck on the ground, they will not slide anymore when they touch the ground and they will be independent from the main movement.
So if we move the locator, the feet moves, but if we move the main control, the feet doesn't follow. Let's see how to do it. First, create two locators from Create Locator and be sure to turn on the locator visibility from the Show panel and check the locator selectivity the question mark from the Selection Mask buttons.
Then rename the locators if you want, for example you can rename them left and right foot. Then position each locator on the feet, snapping them to each foot control. Constrain each locator to the foot control.
First select the foot control, then select the locator and constraint parent, with all the axes on. So now the locators are dragged by the feet controls. So if we move the feet control the locators follows.
Now in the graph editor bake each locator curve. Baking the animation we add keyframe to every frames and now the constraints can be deleted because making the animation we lose the effect because the feet animation is now transferred to the locators. And we can see now that locators and feet have the same animation.
But the point is that we need that the feet will be dragged and controlled by the locators and not by the main control. So let's constrain the feet to the locators. So we do the opposite process we have done before.
First select the locator, then select the foot control and constrain parent with all the axes on. Do the same for the other foot. So the locators became the new feet controls. If we move them the feet follows and the main control doesn't have effects on them anymore.
But we didn't finish yet because we just transferred the feet movement on the locators so we still have the feet sliding effect. To remove this we select one locator and moving on the timeline we go to find the first frame where the foot touched the ground and then we scroll up to the last frame where the foot is still touching the ground. and we delete all the keys between these two.
Remember to use the locators, not the foot control. So the concept is to keep just the first and the last key of contact and these keys must be exactly the same without keys in between. And looking on the graph editor we also be sure that the curve between these two keys is linear, is a flat curve.
We do this for each step and each foot of the walk. You could need to clean the transition where the foot leaves the ground or just before the contact pose, to avoid any pop in the animation. At the end you can bake the feet animation and delete the constraints and the locators, so now the foot control is not parented to the locators anymore, but is subordinate to the main control again.
The final result is that the feet are always stuck on the ground without sliding and you can use any path you want for your walk, even the more complicated. But with this method will be easy to control. This was the second method to move forward a walk cycle or a run cycle and in the next and final video we will see how to transform an in-place cycle in a progressive cycle.
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