".the major drawback is not being able to extend the tangents > asymmetrically." This is an instance where written code may be easier than ICE.ĭate: Wed, 10:02:30 +0200 From: Subject: Re: Multiped rigging? To: Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain charset=US-ASCII format=flowed While each compound would be simple, the sheer number of them would be a bear to manage. You could build Multiped using ICE, but if you go this route, expect a lot of nested compounds as there are many inputs/outputs to create the effect. Downside is it would require a ton of setup. Using this method would provide flexibility in allowing vertical displacement over terrain, and general repositioning of footsteps without having to redo lots of work. This implies that every leg is constrained to nearly every footstep on it's half of the body (e.g. Alternatively, you could position constrain the ankles to the footsteps (w offset) and drive the blend parameter with FCurves or Expressions so each footstep only drives an individual leg for a fraction of the overall timeline. The trick would be to animate the effector representing the ankle of the leg in global space so it sticks to the ground appropriately, then plotting to be in local space of the character so it can be instanced to other legs. The feet could be animated using the animation mixer where each leg would receive the same action source clip but with a time offset. If you had to recreate the effect in XSI, you could constrain the character's body to a path with offset for the walking aspect. In short, Multiped was good for quickly getting a multi-legged character walking across a simple path, but not much more as effort needed to customize the character for desired control could be more work than using a simpler rig and moving the feet manually. If you needed to traverse an incline/decline, you had to plot animation and make the necessary edits after the fact. And as mentioned above, it was restricted to flat terrain. Tight turns revealed sliding of the feet as all foot locations were determined by the transformation applied to the character's hips, not the path. Multiped wasn't as intimately tied to the footsteps as Ambulate. The custom effect provided controls such as step height, spacing between left/right sides, and sway (wobble L/R). This allowed your character rig to be modified independently without losing work.Īmbulate was fairly easy to work with, but had limitations such as you couldn't easily transition the character from being controlled by the custom effect to being manually keyed such as when transitioning from walk to run, or from walk to something else like sit or jump. Therefore, it was common practice to use the Nullifier custom effect to generate nulls from the relevant bits of your character and put them into a separate hierarchy, then constrain your character to those nulls. One downside is any modification to the character hierarchy would cause the custom effect operator to be deleted. The custom effect would then dynamically manipulate the legs to properly follow the footsteps. As part of the setup process, you'd have to pick the hips, ankles of each leg, path, and footsteps to follow. Once footsteps were created, you'd select your character and run Ambulate (biped) or Multiped (4+ legs). If you wanted to go up and down hills, or loop-de-loops, you had to manually reposition the footstep nulls. The default output would create left-right pairs with appropriate offset to follow the spline, but was limited to flat terrain. The basic workflow was to draw paths to represent where the character would walk, then use the StepMaker custom effect to generate nulls to represent the footsteps. In later releases of Softimage|3D, especially after Maya was released, revamped versions of Multiped, Ambulate, and StepMaker were included in the application (~v3.8), but with fewer features. It was originally an ‘unsupported gift’ custom effect which meant you had to download it from the Softimage support website. Multiped was released in 1996 as an ‘unsupported gift’ custom effect for Softimage|3D (v3.5) and was packaged with Ambulate and StepMaker.
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