Walk cycle, extend beginning and end

[flipside]

Hi,

I am making animation where a robot is walking, he walks ino the view, while waving, and walks away out of the view on the other side.

Now the client changed the aspect ratio from 16:9 to 2.66:1. So left and right the image is now much wider, so the robot starts and stops in the view. Now I wanted to copy keyframes from 1 walk cycle in the beginning, move the whle character by the distance of one walkcycle etc. So basically extend the walk cycle, at the start and at the end, so the robot again starts and ends outside the view.

I created the walk with a biped and footsteps, but meanwhile I already converted the footsteps to normal keyframes for further editing.

When I select the whole biped, and copy keyframes from one walkcycle and past them earlier in time, the biped starts to do some funky stuff from the moment I try to movethe wole biped in space. The feet don't want to move along, probably something to do with these special 'planted keys'. (I am a noob in character animation...).

Does someone have any advice on how I should be extending a walk cycle by X number of steps?

Any help greatly appreciated

Cheers,

Wouter

[joconnell]

Select your biped, and save the animation as a bip file. This will bake the animation into a single "clip". If you now open the motion mixer from the character studio tab, you'll have something that looks like an edit timeline. If you search the help files for motion mixer and transition track, you can load in the same clip twice, with the second one slightly offset and it'll blend between the two animations and continue walking out. There's even a "find best blend" feature so it'll match the two clips at the point where the overlap is the smoothest.

[flipside]

Thanks! That kinda worked with my basic knowledge

Is biped footstep animation something that is used professionally, or do you use freeform animation with a custom rig 99% of the time?

[super gnu]

my knowledge of chartater studio could best be described as "basic" too, but i do remember there is a special button you have to click to move the biped around without it messing up.. "move all mode" i believe its called. near the top of the character stuidio interface...

[joconnell]

Character studio was pretty damn good for it's time3, but that time was 1996. It's still damn handy for getting a quick rig out for some basic posing or for loading in a motion capture file to a character, but it's horrible to animate with and it can't use the regular max function curve editor. I know one animator (http://spellcraft.de/) who's amazing and swears by it but he's about the only one. Custom rigs all the way.