Help

Hey I wonder if anyone could help me or direct me to the tutorial I need.

I’m trying to master a simple quick style of animated characters. I’ve attached a file I’m working on. Baisically I want to be able to move the upperbody of the character (including head, arms and top of the legs) as a group but leave the feet anchored in place when the upper body moves. I think I’ve managed this, however I can’t make the far arm and hand appear behind the legs while the rest of the upper body is in front of the legs without ruining what I had going with the anchored feet.

I hope that’s clearly enough explained, looking at the file itself may give a better illustration though.

I have played around with the z depths and different ways of linking vertexes. But I’ve only managed to get myself more stuck so far.

Thanks in advance if anyone can help or point me in the right direction.
issue1.sifz (56.9 KB)

It is weird what you’re trying to achieve. I don’t get to understand why you need to move the body and automatically need to get the feet in place. At some point, you’ll need to move the foot and so then it would add one additional movement relative to the body and so finally you’ll end with the same problem you want to achieve (that I think it is to keep feet in place during a walk cycle).

The right approaching is to first draw the basic contact and pass posses of the walk cycle and then animate the whole shapes matching the poses. See my avatar. It is made with four poses and a few tweaks in between.

Any further automation by linking values is self restrict the freedom of animation and make the character stiff. Let the shapes flow!

Since the new “Clamped” interpolation was introduced in the 0.63.05 version, there is not more “wobble” effect and the feet are easy to keep in place with the usual keyframe/waypoints system.

-G

Thanks for your quick reply. I’ve changed my character style a bit on your advice, Im not worring about clamping the feet in place anymore. (My problem was not really with making a walk cycle on the spot, which I can just about manage, but avoiding a sort of ‘moonwalking’ effect where the feet aren’t clamped to one place when I move the rest of the body)

Anyway I’ve attached a file of the style of how my characters are going to look in a (sort of) walk cycle, and the style of animation I’m going for (nothing fancy, I want to make a lot of animation in a reasonable space of time too much time on it) Most of the problems have gone away, but I’ve still got a problem with the far arm, If you preview the attached file (only 0-2 sec) you can see the far arm swings in front of the legs. I could put the arm below the legs, but then the controls for the upper body (rotation, translation etc.) won’t apply to the far arm.

It’s not a big problem anymore, I’ve got a few workarounds, so if there’s no solution no problem. But if anyone does have a fix would be grateful.
Synfig Animation 3test.sifz (10.1 KB)