High Pose & Passing

At this point you should save your work. If we do something wrong, (thing that is normal at the beginning), we could recover the work done.

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Well, the next step can't be done with curves. We have to adjust "by hand" the poses. We have to create poses that look as the ones in the image and must be keyed in the shown frames.

The frames 0 � 10 � 20 are the ones with the character in his High Pose and just when he starts to fall.

The frames5 � 15 are the Passing Poses... when the character slows down the fall and just before he starts going up.

It's important to forget, right now, what's happening in the other frames. We just have to adjust the shown frames (High Pose & Passing).

All of this must be achieved by hand, so we have to keyframe what we need to.


Contact Pose

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The important thing now is that at least during one frame we can see that the foot is pushing the body up.
We must do this by hand again, moving down the foot right when it should.

The better way to do that is just scrubbing the frames until you can see which one give us a straight leg if we put down the foot to the ground.

Badly I don't know of anything to do this process easy or quick, but adjusting by hand.


Finishing the legs

At this point we have to try to make some arcs on the legs trajectory when they go from rear to front.

The 99% of human movements are done with arcs/curve movements.
The image above shows an example of how should the trajectory look like.

If we use �Show Trajectory� in Max, or �Motion Trail� in Maya, maybe we can get some straight lines. This can be due to the lack of keys in the trajectory. There is no rule, but trying to figure the right trajectory, always looking at the legs and feets inertia.


The feet

The most important thing now is that the feet shows the strenght that the leg is aplying over them, making the inertia visible. The image below shows some rough poses of the rotation and traslation of the feet...

The toes

The toes are an important step in any cycle, we should care when animating them.
They give agility to the cycle, avoiding the legs and feets to look stiff.

Contact frames and falling of the foot, they are rough and just reference for our purpose.


We should animate the toes all around the cycle, making them look as we want depending on the foot pose.

The animation is driven by the inertia, so if the foot goes ahead, the toes should be slow down and rotated backwards... If the foot goes down (like in the image), the toes will be "dragged" by the foot and we should rotate it up.

The image above shows the contact pose of the foot with he ground.
The movement of the toes have to be always slowed down regarding the foot movement (overlap). The number of frames can vary but it should be around 2 or 3 frames.


Arc movements of the feet

Right now the feet probably will have a straight trajectory when they leave the ground, this mean that they come and go through the same path. Once again we have to avoid the stright movements, so the perfect thing to do is to take out the feet from the body in the passing.

The image below shows the arch that the foot should follow. Obviously when the foot is on the ground there is no side movement.