How do you handle elements with different points of rotation

[JD1]

I’m using Animate Pro 3.

If I’m animating a leg which is made up of three elements, the foot, lower leg and upper leg. They each have pegs with the foot rotation point being the ankle, the lower leg is at the knee and the upper leg is at the hip. I also have a hierarchy with the foot peg connected to the lower leg peg and the lower leg peg connected to the upper leg peg.

My question is this. Is there another way to have a set of pegs with different rotation points? I was able to do it by duplicating the foot, lower leg and upper leg elements create new pegs and give those pegs the new rotation points but that seems like an awkward way to go about it. This would be useful if I wanted to rotate the lower and upper leg from the point of the ankle. Like in a walk cycle when the foot is not moving but the rest of the leg is. I would think that temporarily relocating the pegs would be inaccurate and be time consuming if this action was done a lot.

I looked in the forums and couldn’t find anything and didn’t know what everyone else did when they wanted to keep the foot still and move the rest of the leg.

[JD1]

Hi,

I figured it out and I found that using Inverse Kinematics is what I was looking for.

The reason I wanted a second rotation point was for a walk cycle. The peg hierarchy I built was so that if you select the hip peg it rotates the thigh, shin and foot from the peg at the hip. If you select the peg for the shin it rotates the shin and the foot from the pivot at the knee. The foot rotates on its own pivot at the ankle. So with that hierarchy during a walk cycle with the foot flat on the ground I found that it would be easier if I was able to rotate the shin and upper leg from the pivot of the foot for certain parts of the walk cycle. With IK I was able to do that. It took me a while to get the IK set up for the model but it worked like a charm once I got it set up.

[rkriz]

Why do you need a second rotation point for the body part?