Lets talk about footroll..

A look at how the FootRoll attribute on IK leg controls can sometimes trip us up when animating walks and runs.. and an alternative approach which can give cleaner results in some cases. I also demonstrate how I like to clean things up to remove the dreaded knee pop.

Jason Ryan demos bhGhost

Jason Ryan from iAnimate/Disney/Dreamworks/Cinesite made a great video showing how he uses my ghosting tool for Maya.

Tips and Tricks for Animating in Maya, great demo and awesome plugin by Brian Horgan.

Posted by iAnimate.net on Friday, March 11, 2016

Speed Animating a Walkcycle – Timelapse video

A little demo of how I block out a quick walk-cycle using custom mirroring tools I’ve written for Maya. Generally I don’t animate most things in such a layered fashion, but for walks and runs I find it’s a nice way to work quickly.

The main tools I’m using here are scripts that allow me to mirror different kinds of controllers, from IK feet and hands to Spine controllers and FK arms. These will work with pretty much any rig and don’t need any set-up. During the blocking section I’m also using a tool that keys the same pose on the first and last frame of the cycle so I don’t have to play that frame when animating (which would look like a hitch since it’s the same pose as frame 1). That tool is based on the ‘set prompt’ tool in Maya but automatically figures out how long the loop is so I don’t have to type it in each time (I think I’m actually using it too quickly to see clearly in the video but you’ll see it flash up now and then 🙂 )

The other thing you’ll see me doing from time to time is favoring keys using my own version of the classic ‘TweenMachine’ tool (the arrow buttons on my shelf). I wrote a TweenMachine tool for C4D a while back (available on my website) and found I preferred just having some buttons to nudge poses back and forward rather than a slider so I wrote one for Maya too.

At the end of the video I convert the walk-in-place to one that translates in world space using another tool I created called ‘bh_snapToWorldspace’.

This video is sped up 6x and it real time this was about 25 minutes in total. Hope you find it interesting!
The Sheldon rig is from the fantastic iAnimate online animation school.