The Running Man

The first piece of animation will be a run cycle based on an olympic sprinter. To start off, I selected a starting pose for the animation. I decided to go with one with a foot in contact with the floor, and the leg as perpendicular to the floor as possible, since this pose would be easiest to replicate. To help get the pose right, I used a reference video which I posted earlier which would help me get the position, angle and rotation of the bones as close as possible.













Once the pose was good from one side, I flipped to the front row and lined it up into position again. From there on, everytime I forwarded the reference video 10 frames, I moved the animation 5 frames and redid the pose, remembering to add position and rotationg keyframes for each IK bone which I would move. When the runner had completed an exact half-cycle on the video, I simply selected the first frame, selected all the bones, and chose Copy Pose. I then went to the frame where the half-cycle pose was going to be and chose Paste Flipped Pose.

However, when I done this, the legs were completely fine but the arms were out of position. I did some research into what may be the cause for this problem, which was when I was suggested that the axis of the bones in each arm may be different from each other. Sure enough by showing the axis', they were different in each arm. To fix this, I managed to re-align the bone rolls in each arm (which I have already done once before, but not on both arms) which managed to solve the problem. This time when I flipped the pose, all was well.