Hi,

This is my semi-succesful attempt to make a character walk along a spline. The
character does
succesfully move along the spline, and sways from side to side nicely, but I failed in
my
attempt to give him legs.

I know how many times his legs need to cycle through two steps (left then right), but
cannot
think at the moment how to reference these cycles to the main walk. e.g I know the
length of
the spline is 20 units, I want the character to take 40 steps (20 cycles), and I want
to set
up the cycle and then just make it occur 20 times as clock goes from 0 to 1.

I'll think on it some more, but if anyone has any ideas, I'd be very interested.

I know that I'm probably not going about this the best way.

All the best,

Andy Cocker

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Attachments:
Download 'SplineWalker.mpg' (531 KB)

It looks really nice, even just the stills:  I need to learn more lighting &
shadow tricks. What are you using?

> I want to set up the cycle and then just make
>  it occur 20 times as clock goes from 0 to 1.
>

Here's an incompletely thought out way to help you along....

1) Design your walk cycle to from a "Mod_Clock" variable of 0 to 1.
    #declare Mod_Clock=mod(clock*Something,1);

2) Determine the stride length of a single walk cycle.

3) Take miniscule baby steps along the spline until the cumulative
    #declare
Path_lenghth_so_far=path_length+vlength(Spliney(Old_position)-Spliney(New_po
sition)).
When  (Path_lenghth_so_far - Stride_length)< some tiny number, then record
New_position as the end of the current stride.

4)  Move the actor along the Spline from 0 to New_position, having the limbs
go through one Mod_Clock.



"Andrew Cocker" <mai### [at] andrewcockercouk> wrote in message
news:3dd2f7ce$1@news.povray.org...
> Hi,

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"Greg M. Johnson" <gregj:-)565### [at] aolcom> wrote in message
news:3dd3a597$2@news.povray.org...
> It looks really nice, even just the stills:

Thanks.

>I need to learn more lighting &
> shadow tricks. What are you using?

It's just a really quick radiosity and sky_sphere setup:


        radiosity{
        pretrace_start 0.16
        pretrace_end   0.01
        count 200
        nearest_count 4
        error_bound 0.1
        recursion_limit 1
        low_error_factor 1
        gray_threshold 0.0
        minimum_reuse 0.015
        brightness 1.2
        adc_bailout 0.01/2
        }

and

sky_sphere{
 pigment{
  gradient y poly_wave 2 color_map{
   [0 rgb <0.7,0.8,1>*0.5][0.75 rgb 1][1 rgb 1]
  }
   translate -y*0.5 scale 2}
}

Everything in the scene has diffuse 1 and ambient 0. The guy has an orange disc up his
back
passage (;-0) with an ambient of 4.

> Here's an incompletely thought out way to help you along....
>
> 1) Design your walk cycle to from a "Mod_Clock" variable of 0 to 1.
>     #declare Mod_Clock=mod(clock*Something,1);
<snip>
> 4)  Move the actor along the Spline from 0 to New_position, having the limbs
> go through one Mod_Clock.

Yes, that should be of some help.. thanks Greg.

All the best,

Andy Cocker

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> It's just a really quick radiosity and sky_sphere setup:
 ...and no light sources.

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in article 3dd2f7ce$1@news.povray.org, Andrew Cocker at
mai### [at] andrewcockercouk wrote on 14/11/02 1:05 am:

> Hi,
> 
> This is my semi-succesful attempt to make a character walk along a spline. The
> character does
> succesfully move along the spline, and sways from side to side nicely, but I
> failed in my
> attempt to give him legs.

The character looks funny.

All the best

Fidel.

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