Walkin Droid (Page 1 of 2)

Thanks Harald !

I'm a little beginner who likes AoI.

Wow, really nice weight distribution in the walking!

What I was taking about was the center of gravity in it's walking.

thanks for appreciation.

I will try to make a tutorial as soon I get some free time. you'll have to translate it, since I know no german.

also you can find Julian's walk tutorial here : HERE

meanwhile you can play with the aoi file posted above.

~ truth.

Hi!

I'd like to share a some of my own experiences about animating with bones:

Basically the instructions on the manual work OK, but there are a couple of things to consider that may make your life with the model easier on the long run:

1) Julian seems to have created the skeleton in the front view (or at least front-direction of the model). This can produce trouble with joints like shoulder and hips, where there is a more permanent joint first and the the other direction that performs most of the motion.
Julian's approach as been to add short extra bones into the joints. However, this is not necessarily possible if you create the skeleton in the side view (and to some bones up-view) of the model. This way the permanent type bends happen to the "flat" direction of the bone and the other direction is uneffected by the first one. (This is result of how the spherical coordinaes of the bones are defined)

2) Julian has used a up-down-correction track to keep the wax-man on the ground while walking. This is not necessary, if you create each gesture so that the model is touching a "reference-floor". This may not be a reasonable requirement if your model does very large movements, but just for a basic walk it should work. -- The entire model moves (up-and-down in it's local coordinate system) when you move the "Root 0"-point of the skeleton, so you can easily have it walk.

3) To my mind 6 gestures should be enough to animate a "normal" walk cycle with 2 or 4 legs. -- Julan has used 8, where the "Down 1" and "-2" gestures look a kind of exaggerated to me... Well -- maybe he had his reasons

Here is another discussion about skeletons: http://www.friendlyskies.net/aoiforum/v … 345#p15345 ... In there I posted back a file, that originally was created by TheWoods. What I did there, was to apply, what I worte about #1) above.

@Pete  I agree, the problem  exists specifically with shoulder joints. since they're kind of ball-socket joints , 180 by 180 range of movement + twist.

you are right, I should've created those bones in side view. Also, I think creating skeleton when model is in the spread-eagle position also helps.
I wish that there should be different joint types/presets for bones in AoI, and a better visual transform tool like the gizmo.

as far walk simulation is concerned, once I also tried constraining feet to follow cyclic curves as paths, and left rest to IK solver, the result wasn't  good. AoI IK solver is broken.