Complete Rig and Walk Cycle…

he basic Marty rig is complete! It was fairly easy to rig him because I didn’t have to add a whole bunch of constraints or any shape keys like I did with Bone. I could probably go back and limit the rotation of some of the bones in order to make sure they won’t intersect with any of the body pieces, but it seems sort of unnecessary.

I worked on a walk cycle for Marty last night and managed to come up with the following:

Marty Walk Cycle from Tim Brown on Vimeo.

For the most part I followed the ManCandy DVD walk cycle tutorials. They are very detailed, so if you plan on making a walk cycle I highly recommend them.

I ran into an odd thing when converting the walk cycle action to an NLA strip. I converted the action over, then repeated it 10 times. Doing this will make him take 10 steps, but unless you specify an offset bone to follow, he will take those 10 steps starting from the same point each time, which is not what I wanted. I wanted him to take steps forward. The offset bone I selected is the Spine1 bone, but for some reason he was leaving his right foot behind as he walked off! If was quite funny to watch, but was wrong obviously! I had to create a Master bone and parent Spine1, along with both feet bones to it. That is why you see those dashed lines sticking out of the back of him during his walk. It works fine now, but it was curious why only the right foot was left behind and not both feet? They are setup the exact same way?