I was wondering, as this may help me finish a project,
what is the procedure when creating a walk cycle using poser walk designer and porting it over to Carrara? Reading the archives, Captain Jack might have done this in the past, anyone have some insight on what works best melding Poser WD with Carrara?

(using Poser 6 and Carrara 7 pro)

I love walk designer and wish that Carrara had it.

However, if you are going to be using Carrara for the animation, actually creating the walk cycle in Carrara will provide you with more flexibility during the animation process because every element of the figure is key framed when imported from Poser. This means animating other parts of the body or using Carrara's animation clips won't really work.

That said, there are two ways. 1) create the animation in Poser and import the Poser file into Carrara, 2) create the animation in Poser and export a .bvh motion file which you can import into Carrara and attach it to the figure of your choice. 

I recently completed a walk cycle tutorial for 3D World Magazine using Carrara. I'll get it post up in a little while so you can take a look. The tutorial is for creating a cycle for a spider but the same tricks can be used for a person.

Mark

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.

Great, some good points,
Likely, what I will do is use this, perhaps composite the scene (figure with alpha, and a separately rendered animated backdrop) since I'm not worried too much about showing below the knees.

With exporting the bvh and importing it into Carrara:
I had some other bvh files and tried them out but I'm a little confused on how they are attached to a figure, are they drag dropped on the "model" portion of the figure like hair?
I also had one funny instance where I imported the bvh and had this mini-bone-skeleton roaming invisibly around the scene, unattached from my figure, I likely had dropped in on the wrong spot.
I believe the bvh's were not consistent with naming as some trials resulted in the figure twisting wildly.
Or this may be the rag-doll effect you are indicating.
Thanks for the info so far, I'll see what I can do here...

Quote - I love walk designer and wish that Carrara had it.

However, if you are going to be using Carrara for the animation, actually creating the walk cycle in Carrara will provide you with more flexibility during the animation process because every element of the figure is key framed when imported from Poser. This means animating other parts of the body or using Carrara's animation clips won't really work.

Mark

One thing I have been doing, is pre-animating the figure with the lip synching and facial movements (like blinks and eyebrow movements and headnods), save it as an object in the browser, and then start animating the body with motion in a newscene with importing the animated figure from the browser and working out the hand and body gestures.
This way if I mess up, I can still have this backup figure in the browser.

I still find adding NLA's will pop the morphs out of my figures (I might still be doing something wrong, but havent had the time to work it out yet), but they works great for other things being animated.

I might still use this process, pre-animating the face and then apply the walk-designer animation, cross my fingers,

For bvh usage, select the Hip bone and the choose File>Import>BVH. I dialog box will open asking if you want to attached it to the selected skeleton or create a new one. There are some other options in there as well.
Mark

Awesome thanks...
I also found out my prob with loading NLA's, lol... the "load clip data" button when you select your model and access the property tabs, allows the model to have the NLA inserted without demorphing the model.

I just did a test...
Also applied my method of pre-creating the facial animation (of talking and head motions) and THEN importing the BVH to hip.
Walk designer BVH did not add keyframes to the Head/Neck, so my lip-synch head-motion was uninterrupted providing the effect I wanted, awesome!!!

Also Fingers are also clear of BVH keyframes (but not hand motion) so you can pre-animate the fingers (clenched fist, curl fingers and thumbs) without worry.

 Ha! Glad you got that one. I'd meant to mention it in my last post but the phone rang and I got side-tracked. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Ask me. I know. ;)

Mark, having 3 months of VTC with your tutorials (Anime Studio Pro and Carrara), has changed my frustration to feeling free to pursue my goals in 3D production.

Tho we have little quirky things in these programs, it seems there are work-around's that we discover from time-to-time.

The last Month of creating a full animation project from storyboard to product has been one wild ride, but full of joy as its coming to a close to this project.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me here and at the Daz forums, I only hope to help everyone here with what I'm discovering each day with as much dedication as you all have helped me.

I'm having a lot of fun using Carrara (with Poser 6, Hexagon, trueSpace, and Anime Studio helping out in their parts) I'm glad I chose Carrara to be my crux as it seems to be the best communicator with all my 3D programs.