I've had problems with the walk designer because of constraints. With Michael 4, as an example, I have problems with his toes going through the floor. If I turn contraints off, he looks more like a rag doll shot out of a cannon.

What I've had some better luck with is to import the figure into Carrara, and then apply one of the walk designer poses directly to the figure, then tweak it inside Carrara.

One problem with the walk designer that I've had is I've never been able to figure out how to export the motion path. When I use the walk designer, my character always wants to walk in place.

One thing I noticed is that if you move the character from point A to point B in a straight line while his feet are moving, the feet look like they slide a little bit. I studied some video of people moving, and I noticed that the difference is that when people actually walk, the foot on the ground stays still and the body rotates around it. I don't know why that wasn't obvious to me at first, but it made perfect sense after I looked at the videos.

I found a good way to simulate this was to apply the walk cycle to the figure without regard to the sliding, then move the entire figure forward through the timeline along the distance that the figure was to travel. Then, I went back to each place where the figure put his foot down, and determined how many frames the foot was on the ground. Then I calculated the distance the foot was sliding by dividing the distance from the beginning to the end by the number of frames in the walk, multipled by the number of frames the foot was on the ground. Then I went to each frame that was the first the foot was on the ground, set a key frame, then went to the last the foot was on the ground, and moved the figure back the short distance I had calculated. That was tedious, and my brain was screaming at me to learn how to do NLA clips (hadn't learned it at that point), but the walk looked much more realistic.

Oh, if you do that, you'll want a linear tweener for the short slide back; a curved tweener may make it look like he's skipping.

There was one scene I was trying to make where the character runs in from the left, stops, looks around frantically, then turns and walks quickly down an alley. I made a walk cycle in Poser for the run and stop, saved it as a pose, and brought it into the scene. Then I key-framed the look around and the start of the walk down the alley, then I used one of the stock walk designer pose files for the walk down the alley. The walk part didn't need to be all that smooth because he was going off-camera, so I deleted every other key frame to get him to move faster, which worked okay.

I was never happy with the key framing of the frantic look around. I made a video tape of myself acting it out to get a better sense of the timing, but I got distracted and never went back and finished the animation. I'll have to dig that one back out and see what I can do with it.