Animating a walk cycle in Motion Builder

WIP tutorial by Domarius. Need to move over mentions for "movement cycles" from my tips page into here, cause they will be redundant then.

Just some personal notes for now.

• Make contact step at frame 0, hips go down
• Make a passing step at frame 10, hips go up
• Reverse contact step at frame 20 by copying keyframes to other limbs
• Reverse passing step at frame 30 by copying keyframes to other limbs
• Finalise loop by copying keyframes from 0 to 40
• Make a new animation layer called Hips & Shoulders rotation, add the vertical torsion in the hips and shoulders on this layer (seperate from the hips up & down keyframes)

Knee popping happens due to the foot moving along a linear path. In real life, the knee stays where it is and the bottom half of the leg swings off it like a pendulum, so the foot follows an arc. In Motion builder, if you set two key frames for the foot, it moves in a straight line past the knee, and becomes closer to the knee halfway, causing it to bend, and then becomes further away towards the end of the path, causing the knee to straighten out again. This is not natural, you need to add more key frames to force the foot to follow a curve.

TODO:

• need to get the actual forward movement happening.
• Smooth out the loop by editing the animation curves for all the keyframes on 0 and 40