Advice on walk cycle for tortoise

Mosk the Scribe

Have some general questions about trying to animate a very basic walk cycle for the DAZ tortoise.

I was plannig to do a simple walk cycle for the tortoise - going back and forth between trying to use IK with Target Helpers or Puppeteer inside DAZ Studio.  Generally speaking, though - assuming I'm going to animate the tortoise walking in place and take care of froward motion later, should I still be making minor adjustments like translating and/or rotating the hip (or Shell in this case) back and forth / up and down / forward and back.  

Without doing that, i quickly run into problems with the feet not being able to touch down properly.  

Thanks for any suggestions.

PhilW

The best thing to do first is watch a tortoise walking! Really study it and see not only how the legs move but how the shell moves too. Assuming that you don't have one handy (who knows?!), then I am sure that there are plenty of YouTube videos. You could even try Googling to see if anyone else has animated one and how they went about it (assuming that it looks good, beware of following advice from someone who produces a poor end result). With any walking motion, if you are animating it in place, be aware of how much forward motion there will be, and use IK target helpers to get the basic movement forward and backward. It will need to be the same distance for both front and rear legs.

You might want to start by just having two keys and the extremes of forward and backward motion - and use linear interpolation for the target helpers, otherwise the forward motion will not be smooth (assuming that it is - or is it more of a lurch forward for a tortoise? I haven't done the research!). Then add keys half way between to keep the foot on the ground as it moves backwards (propelling the creature forwards) and lifting it off the ground as it comes forwards again.  That may be all you need, or you may need to add extra keys at the half way points again to fine tune the action. 

It may be easiest to start by animating so that the extreme forward position on the forward limb coincides with the extreme backwards position of the rear limb, but that probably isn't quite how it works, so you may need to look at staggering the motions (by dragging all the keys for a particular limb) to account for the correct timing.

For a common tortoise, I am guessing that from most angles, you can't even see the legs on the far side!  But again, you may need to look at relative timing if say viewed from a very low angle or from above.  And probably a giant tortoise walks a bit differently than a small tortoise!

I hope I have given you some approaches to try and food for thought. 

Mosk the Scribe

Hey Phil - 

Love your training series on Carrara - and thanks for the pointers.

I have watched a number of YouTube videos of tortoises walking but still had a hard time replicating the motion in a satisfactory manner.  

Certainly could cheat with camera angles to hide the far side feet - but i was looking at this as a learning experience, rather than simply trying to get things adequate for this project.

There were a number of complicating factors - including needing to make sure legs weren't cutting through the shell; and the shell on this model doesn't rotate free of the body (rather serves as root, which means any shell rotations would require pinning feet in DAZ or using Target helpers with IK in Carrara; but posing the legs somehow wasn't working well via IK, which meant a constant back and forth between enabling and disabling tracking.  

Anyhow, moving on for now - may try some walk cycles on more conventional models when I have time and come back to this in the future once I'm more fluid with IK/TH, NLA, and perhaps some posing in DAZ Studio w Puppeteer / aniblock importer.

Thanks

Diomede

A lot seems to depend on what surface they are on, and whether there are any cats around.

Sorry I can't be of practical help, but here is a compilation video.

Mosk the Scribe

Thanks.  in retrospect, i think part of my problem was that I didn't pay enough attention to how the back legs work (more straight back) versus the front legs (off to the side).  

3DAGE

the tortoise should have a "walk" pose,.

this will give you a good start point.

At that point you can also create a couple of target helpers,. place these where the feet are in the walk pose,. you can then use these as markers for swapping the pose Left/Right which will help you keep a consistent gait.

adjust your screen view for animation,. Use a split view/quad view so you can see the model from different angles

Use the LEFT / Front / Top views to move the feet.

Ideally you should copy the Walk pose from frame 0 to the end of your animaton,. EG: 2 seconds in (Alt+click and drag the keys to copy them)

you only need to create One full step of animation,. then select the shell go to the XYZ tracks for position/rotation, and adjust the forward position.

use the LEFT/RIGHT view's to adjust the forward position at the end on the animtion,.

Scrub the timeline,. if the feet are "slipping" adjust the forward position untill it looks correct.

Go to the NLA tab and create a Master clip,. Select the SHELL as the loop point.

Load the NLA clip into the track,. then set the NLA options to "Loop" .

now you can extend that animaion by dragging the end of the clip as much as you need.

If you want to edit this animation,.

delete the NLA track from the timeline,. go to the NLA panel, and choose Load clip data,. to load the animtion keyframes back into the timeline.

edit as needed,. Create a new Master clip.

Hope it helps

WendyLuvsCatz

it would be slower than the hare ....

Mosk the Scribe

Thanks 3dAGE - will go back and try the tortoise walk cycle again with the steps you laid out once time isn't such an issue.  (for now I've got something workable)