Walking motion on various terrains

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3 comments, last by oliii 14 years, 9 months ago
Hi, I wrote this post in the math section because the solution to my problem might be quite math-intensive. Here is what I'm trying to achieve: I have a character animated via a vertex shader (I'm working with a product derived from DirectX). The walking animation has been exported from 3DS max and is working fine as long as the character is walking on a flat surface. Problems appear when you increase or decrease the slope of the terrain and incoherences appear (character kind of flying, feet entering the ground, sliding effect...). The challenge is to find a way to re-calibrate the animation in real-time (and still using the original walking motion) so that the character goes up and down the slope coherently. If you have experience in this topic, papers about it that I could read, or even just technique names, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks
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This is not a simple topic, and you'll probably notice than many games don't even bother to make it work properly.

Having said that, this is the best implementation by far that I've ever seen. The videos he's got there should give you an idea of how it's implemented, but as I said, it's not a simple topic :-)
The area that you'll want to research is Inverse Kinematics (IK).

Thanks a lot Codeka for the link. That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve, and this person did it perfectly! I hope I'm going to learn more about his method by reading and watching what he uploaded on his blog.

I already worked with IK in order to animate a skeleton from motion capture data, I was just missing the additional steps needed to adjust the walking animation. Thanks again, that's going to help me a lot ;)
Good examples of the use of IK is Prince Of Persia and Assassin's Creed.

oh yeah, and this.

or here if you don't have / want a gamasutra account.

Everything is better with Metal.

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