I was wondering if anyone knew what I was doing wrong. I am trying to use the Psionic dog with the locomotion system and am hopefully close to getting it working. Unfortunately, the gallop function is looking very strange and the front legs are bending in a very strange way. I checked the settings against the coyote sample and I am not sure how the dog is so different. Here is what is happening:
First of all, you are letting the dog move with a speed of 6, while the speed of the Trot animation is 3.25 and the speed of the Gallop animation is 19.0. Thus you get a blend of Trot and Gallup, which does not always blend so well for extended periods.
However, it seems that making the dog move with a speed of 19 also create weird results.
I would suggest to load the Dog inside the Locomotion System demo project and set it up in the Motion Analysis scene. By looking at the motion analysis curves, it’s possible to get a better clue about what may have went wrong. I suspect that in the Gallop animation the legs do not move with linear speed when in contact with the ground, but it’s difficult to tell without having the motion analysis curves to look at.
I still haven’t figured out how to set it up in the motion analysis scene, but I will work on that. I did, however, delete the “gallop” animation and restricted the character to “trot” speeds which will probably work for my needs. At that speed, the dog looks pretty realistic. However, the front legs are still bending too much when the dog steps up on to something. Also, I would like to restrict how far the legs splay out from each other when going sideways. Are there settings in the script (and which script) to be able to “stiffen” a joint in any particular axis?
Yeah, currently the inverse kinematics for legs with more than two bones does not always produce good-looking results. I’d like to research better methods for future versions but right now there’s not much to do about it.
No. However, simply putting such a restriction on it would just result in foot skating/sliding. You need to instead just make the dog rotate slower (or use an animation when turning where the dogs take smaller, faster steps).