Hello everyone, and Happy New Year. It’s going to be a good long productive year (I hope) for all of us. I would like to begin my year with a question regarding walk cycles. I have created a walk cycle for a character I made. My issue is this. How can I get him to take more than two steps? I figure a “walk cycle” is One...Two...steps and then you can loop the animation right? I feel like I’m missing something because it doesn’t work that way for me. My animation has the character’s starting position as standing still, then he takes two steps and then comes back to standing position. How can I make it so I can easily adjust how many steps he takes? I am not using a biped, I’m using a custom rig of bones and HI solvers. Thank you in advance.

Intel Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
Windows Ultimate 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5900 Series
3DS Max 2011

Thanks for the reply, I did as you said and almost everything worked out ok. The only thing that didn’t work was the linking objects to a dummy. It ruined my animation when I attempted to do this. All I have is an ik solver for each leg, then everything else is just linked to each other. Since I’m on a time constraint I didn’t have much time to play with it. So next time I make a walk cycle I’ll make sure I use control objects as well. Just wondering. Is there any way to keep the feet perfectly flat along a plane during a walk cycle? a trick or something that I don’t know? or do I have to adjust the foot rotation frame by frame and get it as close to flat as possible each time?

Intel Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
Windows Ultimate 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5900 Series
3DS Max 2011