Footsteps - Chains - Root - Hip

The Footstep System creates a chain of footsteps for each leg as a visual reference in your scene. An expression binds a reversed foot skeleton to this chain. You still have to set up your own skeleton structure, create IK handles for the feet and group these handles to the reverse foot skeleton. The tool takes care of foot, wrist and hip motion and provides additional information to add secondary motion to the skeleton.

Up to eight chains can be created, that will be placed under a root node. You have the choice to give each chain an individual display color so the steps belonging  to one chain can be identified easily. The hip locator is placed relative to the feet and has basic transform attributes for translation and rotation.

Reverse Foot Skeleton

The foot skeleton consists of three bones: ankle, ball and toe. You can set individual rotation values for each bone. The foot skeleton root node controls the translation while the foot moves around. You can set i.e. lift height, side swing, forward swing and other attributes that influence the motion. With these and additional attributes you can create motions like standard walking,
walk on tiptoe, dancing, climbing ladders, limping, shuffling, hopping and many more.

Timing

Each footstep has an extensive set of timing attributes. The most basic values are rest and lift, that tell the reverse foot skeleton how long it must stay on the ground and how long the lift phase will take. Other attributes control the motion of each individual bone dependent on the lift time.

Each chain node has a time scale attribute, that affects the underlying footsteps. The root node has a global timing attribute, that will affect all underlying chains. By default it is animated by a linear animation curve and corresponds to the current frame value. You can alter this curve by inserting keys or replace it i.e. with an expression. This way you can i.e. slow down the motion, stop or reverse it.

Presets - Copy - Blend

To ease the creation process the Footstep System provides user definable presets. You can modify existing presets and store new ones at will. To enhance the animation workflow you can copy selected footstep attributes from one step to several others. When you call the copy function the user interface will represent the current footstep settings and you can modify the attributes before using the paste function. Using the blend tool you can fade smoothly between different motion styles within one chain from one footstep to another.

Arranging Footsteps

It can be much work and somehow irritating when positioning hundreds of footsteps for a character character with more than 4 legs. To ease this process you can draw a nurbs curve or curve on surface for the specific chain, select several footsteps and spread them along the curve. This way you can precisely place footsteps even for complicated, bend paths.