Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
With that in mind, let's block in the rest of the sequence: a walk to the chair, grabbing the chair, followed
by the kid pitching the block. Before we do though, let's take a brief detour to discuss the philosophy of
walking.
What is walking? Putting one foot in front of the other, in a way. But if you walk around for a while
and really pay attention to what you're doing, it's actually rather fascinating. When we walk, we don't
usually think about our feet. They seem to have a mind of their own. We just decide where we want to
go. The main part of our body heads in that direction and our feet manage to keep themselves under us,
maintaining our balance as we go. In fact, it's even a little better than that, as our leading foot during a
stride seems to also know which direction we'll be heading in next, with the toe pointing in the appropri-
ate direction to manage the arc.
To translate this into animation terms, it would be ideal if we could just pull our character around and
have the feet do the automatic balance and ESP act that our own feet seem to be capable of. Unfortunately,
Blender does not have such a system. It does, however, give us some insight into how to proceed. Since
the feet are really a secondary consideration, positioning themselves to maintain balance and optimize launch
force, what should be considered first is the motion of the main body.
The technique that I use, as well some other animators, is to temporarily ignore the feet and just move
the body around. Later, during the interpolation phase, you key the feet to keep up with the body.
In the case of our sample project, this is easily accomplished by removing the leg/foot portion of the model
from the active layer. The result is that we will continue
our posing adventure with half a person.
Figure 11.17
shows our poor kid,
sans
legs.
From a top view then, you can advance to something like
20 frames past our last set of keys, move the
body_
control
bone, then rinse and repeat several times until he
stands beside the chair. The automatic keying takes care
of saving the positions each time.
Figure 11.18
shows the
character at 20-frame intervals, which is where keys were
made. Notice how he starts to rotate before he gets to
the chair. Do a similar walk for yourself and see how your
body pulls itself into position, anticipating where you're
going to end up.
The fact that we're advancing 20 frames is just for con-
venience. If you actually set up a chair near yourself and
walk this off, you'll find that the amount of time it takes
really depends on how fast you're moving. There is a
pretty wide latitude here, and the final determination will
be made by the specifics of your character and the needs
of the scene. Here, we don't really have a lot of “char-
Figure 11.17
What hath our method wrought?
Search WWH ::
Custom Search