Apart from mocap and/or imports from other programs, what techniques do you guys prefer in Vam?
One of the biggest issues I face are the dreaded sliding feet.
I've tried root and non-root animation, a.k.a, moving or not moving the actual person atom.
Root animation has the advantage of being able to be saved and reused easily, with timeline imports. With some good keyframing, and messing with timeline curves, feet won't slide, or it won't be noticeable. However, some specific work may still need to be used, when turning for instance. I use some on-the-fly methods. None of them are stelar but sometimes kinda work?
1 - Take the feet slide and correct the worst deviation between frames. May need various corrections, which makes it not very elegant.
2 - Align an empty atom on foot's start position, and then align the foot's end position to the empty atom. Can sometimes complement the first method, but ends up with the same problems.
3 - Align an empty atom on foot's start position, use a triger in timeline to link to atom (empty) / link to (object) with physics link. Disable link when necessary. Bulletproof on position, but it's a bit of work and when disabling link there's sometimes a "jump" or popping back into place to follow timeline's keyframes.
Non-root animation is nice for specific anims in a scene, typically short things, but it's not reusable/importable and I sometimes ended up with more work by having to use more keyframes that in root-animation I wouldn't have to bother with, like head or chest.
I've never checked if there was some sort of plugin to easily lock feet. Will have a look.
One of the biggest issues I face are the dreaded sliding feet.
I've tried root and non-root animation, a.k.a, moving or not moving the actual person atom.
Root animation has the advantage of being able to be saved and reused easily, with timeline imports. With some good keyframing, and messing with timeline curves, feet won't slide, or it won't be noticeable. However, some specific work may still need to be used, when turning for instance. I use some on-the-fly methods. None of them are stelar but sometimes kinda work?
1 - Take the feet slide and correct the worst deviation between frames. May need various corrections, which makes it not very elegant.
2 - Align an empty atom on foot's start position, and then align the foot's end position to the empty atom. Can sometimes complement the first method, but ends up with the same problems.
3 - Align an empty atom on foot's start position, use a triger in timeline to link to atom (empty) / link to (object) with physics link. Disable link when necessary. Bulletproof on position, but it's a bit of work and when disabling link there's sometimes a "jump" or popping back into place to follow timeline's keyframes.
Non-root animation is nice for specific anims in a scene, typically short things, but it's not reusable/importable and I sometimes ended up with more work by having to use more keyframes that in root-animation I wouldn't have to bother with, like head or chest.
I've never checked if there was some sort of plugin to easily lock feet. Will have a look.
