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Monday 31 May 2010

Foot Setup


Foot setup is now complete, so here's a quick rundown describing exactly whats happening.
Each toe has an fk joint chain running down it (I could have opted for an IK spline chain, driven by fk but decided this was a little overkill - There's no particular closeup of the feet in any shot). Getting the feet into the right pose is quite important, watching the video's I've noted the positions and shapes they achieve whilst walking and flying.

Each joint is connected at the ankle by three separate joints; which are not for skinning, but will allow toes to rotate downwards independantly. I've set up a "relax" attribute on the foot controller that will control this. I'll create a seperate ankle control for skinning which will have the ik handle attached.

Each joint has a nurbs control curve attached to its shape node using the parent -add -shape command. Took me quite a while to figure out that the shape has to be at the origin, with all its transforms frozen out, history deleted. Otherwise it maintains offset from the origin. We don't want that. This is a really nice processor friendly, Outliner tidy way of doing things (rather than using parent constraints). 

Set driven keys can now be applied simply to pose the feet into walking and flying positions, and speed up the animation process.

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