Hi all,

I have created a walk cycle on a CAT rig but I need to reposition it and and have it at an angle but I am having no luck.

I originally created the character walking straight foward but now I need him walking diagonally towards something which- but rotating the trianglar master control below the character’s feet does not seem to do anything.

Could somebody please help me? Much appreciated

Thank You :)

All this can be found in the help-file, but here goes.

The CATparent-object does not control your characters animations in any way so moving or rotating it does nothing.

First of all a question… did you create the walk cycle on a normal absolute animation layer, or by using CATmotion?

If you used absolute, the control you’re looking for is the Layer Transform Gizmo, which you can activate from the Display Layer Transform Gizmo-button. Toggle this button to show your animation layer master control.

But, if you used CATmotion for the cycle, you need to attach your motion into a dummy. So, create one and go to the CATmotion Editor: under Globals-tab use the Path Node-button to select the dummy as parent. After that, controlling your walk is a simple matter of animating the dummy.

Thank You very much- I am using absolute and I got it working :) -

I did activate it before but didn’t realise it would be what I was looking for.

Thanks again- you’ve saved me a lot of time and hastle.

However it seems to be a very temperamental function. Sometimes the gizmo doesn’t display at all, for one of my characters even when it does show it does nothing when you postion/rotate it. All I can see is my IK Target moving around in space but the model doesn’t move.

For this character it does not appear at the center of the Master Node, so I hold CTRL when turning it on to get it in the right place but that still does not help.

Any suggestions?

Thanks :)

Anybody know why this is so buggy and how to fix it, since I still cannot get it to work on one of my rigs. Are there any settings I should check?

Thanks

Okay, I have looked into schematic view comparing the Animation LayerTransform node of the rig where it doesn’t work with a rig where it does.

I have found that on the rig where the gizmo does work properly, in schematic view, its node appears as a green block with a dark blue outline, whereas the node for the rig where it doesn’t work as it should- it appears as a green block with a red outline, and on the left side of the block there’s a bit of empty space between the green and the outer red outline.

With this character all the animation layertransform controls are the IK targets and nothing else.

I hope this helps give a hint as to what is going wrong.

Thanks :)

I hope I understood you correctly :) Thought of a few things.

When you toggle the Gizmo button, the Layer Transfer Gizmo is created into the MAX layer you have active. So if the gizmo doesn’t appear, be sure to check that the active MAX layer isn’t hidden.

As for the other thing, the problem you’re experiencing sounds like a bug of some sort, haven’t bumped into that one yet. Do you have multiple animation layers on the character? The Layer Transform Gizmo is layer specific (each CAT layer has it’s own), so make sure you have the correct CAT animation layer active in the CAT Layer Manager when trying to animate the gizmo. Also, make sure your current CAT layer doesn’t have any other absolute layers on top of it, because the top layer will always override the lower one.

Can’t think of anything else at this time, soz.

Sorry but we have a policy at the workplace not to use unofficial files.

There’s one more thing you could try, that sometimes fixes strange problems. Try merging everything in your scene file into an empty scene and see if it works then. :)

I understand.
Unfortunately the merging trick did not work.

I have found something else which may hint to what the problem may be, as I mentioned earlier that the gizmo only works with IK thus it only moves the arms when in IK mode. The IK targets are at the origin (left where the model was when originally merged into the scene). Now when I hit CTRL+A to select all everything that is slected gets a its own small gray gizmo with xyz axis- I get these also at the orgin around the IK Targets in shape of the rig even though nothing is there. I am guessing somehow information of the rig has been left behind there or something?