Answered

Treadmill helper for walk/run cycle creation

3 years ago • updated by 3 years ago • 1

If I had a chance to be heard I would suggest this to all animation software makers out there. This would be very helpful especially for movement cycles of any kind. A plane that acts like a treadmill below the feet of the character, that infinitely moves in a configurable direction with a configurable speed and amount of markers (like the notches on a tank chain), so you can adjust it to the speed of your cycle and know exactly when a foot has to touch/leave the ground.

I'm sure this can be done easily with a bit of fiddling, but it would be nicer as part of this marvellous tool, toggleable inside the main animation view.

UMotion Version:

Any

Unity Version:

Any

Answer

Answered

3 years ago

Hi,
thank you very much for your feature request. I really appreciate that.

You can do this already:

Create a plane in Unity.
Make the plane a child of your character's Game Object. If your character is of type "humanoid", place it as a child of the hips bone.
Add your character to UMotion's Pose Editor and let UMotion create a configuration for your current setup.
Humanoid Only:
1. Open the config mode, select the plane in the hierarchy and set "Visibility" to "Show" (in the properties tab).
2. Then switch to the constraints tab and assign a child-of constraint and enable "IK Pinning Mode".
3. Return to pose mode, move the frame cursor to the first frame, select the Plane and enable "IK Pinned" in the channels view. This ensures that the plane's position is in world-space.
Create a key frame on frame 0 with the plane being in the current position.
Set the frame cursor to where your walk cycle is going to end approximately and move the plane to the desired end point. Then create a key frame for it.
Optional: Set the position curve to linear (to avoid easing in/out of the plane's velocity). Go back to the curves view anytime you want to adjust the velocity of the plane.
Before exporting your animation, go into config mode, select the plane and set it's visibility to "locked". This avoids that the plane ends up in the exported animation.

As this is relatively straight forward to do, I currently have no plans to add such a feature to UMotion. I'm sorry.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,

Peter

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Answer

Answered

3 years ago

Hi,
thank you very much for your feature request. I really appreciate that.

You can do this already:

Create a plane in Unity.
Make the plane a child of your character's Game Object. If your character is of type "humanoid", place it as a child of the hips bone.
Add your character to UMotion's Pose Editor and let UMotion create a configuration for your current setup.
Humanoid Only:
1. Open the config mode, select the plane in the hierarchy and set "Visibility" to "Show" (in the properties tab).
2. Then switch to the constraints tab and assign a child-of constraint and enable "IK Pinning Mode".
3. Return to pose mode, move the frame cursor to the first frame, select the Plane and enable "IK Pinned" in the channels view. This ensures that the plane's position is in world-space.
Create a key frame on frame 0 with the plane being in the current position.
Set the frame cursor to where your walk cycle is going to end approximately and move the plane to the desired end point. Then create a key frame for it.
Optional: Set the position curve to linear (to avoid easing in/out of the plane's velocity). Go back to the curves view anytime you want to adjust the velocity of the plane.
Before exporting your animation, go into config mode, select the plane and set it's visibility to "locked". This avoids that the plane ends up in the exported animation.

As this is relatively straight forward to do, I currently have no plans to add such a feature to UMotion. I'm sorry.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,

Peter

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