A good 3D walk-cycle generator (including good-looking TURNING characters)

[Monsieur OUXX]

Hi,
I'm looking for a piece of software that would make easy AND realistic walk animations. I'm thinking of Poser because it's a all-in-one solution, but I have a question to ask for people who have already used it :

Are "turning" characters  (that is, characters that are suddenly changing direction while they walk) realistic in there, or is Poser just rotating the character while the walkcycle goes on?

Realistic "turning" characters imply having them putting their foot on the ground, and rotating their leg and hips while the foot is not moving.

[m0ds]

With walk designer (a built in feature) - Poser turns the character with the feet turning at the same time. Here's a sample of using the walk designer with a walk path with sharp turns. It's not too bad, but it is definitely the whole character's axis turning I reckon.

http://www.screen7.co.uk/junc/p6walk.avi

However, the time line and key frame features are naturally useful for doing away with walk designer and making some motion for yourself. And with the right level of patience I think you'd be able to work on specific realistic turning animations. May require writing down a lot of x, y and z values on some paper, though

Another method untested by myself would be to use the default walk cycles that don't require you to load Walk designer at all. It just gives any character 30 frames of walking animation. After that 30 frames, you can then work on your own number of frames for a realistic turn, and then just add the walk cycle prop to the character again to have them continue moving their legs. This way you can get your characters to do some crazy stuff like jumping, rolls, etc, just depending on what "poses" you then key-frame.

I'd give p6 an overall "default" walking quality of 6.5/10, sometimes the characters glitch, but I've seen some animations, not sure if it's poser 6 or 7 - I think it's 7, where they can look really stunning, but no idea if they just used default methods or worked on the frames themselves. That said, making 20 walking frames for an ags game in four directions is a doddle using poser.

Crap example of coming out of a walk sequence into a different pose

[Monsieur OUXX]

Thanks. Your sample video pretty much answers my question : the character is simply rotated around the vertical axis, but there is not specific animation dedicated to changing direction, which is a pity.

Do you or anyone know if a tool does that?

the solution you suggested (manually editing the keyframes) is Ok for one character but I'm looking for a universal solution, with as little work involved as possible.

[Wersus]

I'm not really an expert on this, but I would expect there to be no easy solutions to animating something like this. It depends so much on what kind of turning you are doing (character speed, turn 30 degrees, turn 90 degrees, turn 180 degrees...) that it seems quite hard to come up with a solution that fits all purposes. It would also have to be synchronized with the walkcycle so that the animation is done precisely on the right frame.

[LimpingFish]

There's also Daz3D Studio and it's "AniMate" plugin. Animations are created using "blocks" of motion-captured actions, and there are specific blocks of turning animations that can be tagged on to the end of walkcycle blocks, making for a supposedly smooth transition between the two.

Daz 3D Studio is free, and some example blocks are also free, but the rest are paid content.

You can see them here.

It works about as well as you'd expect, depending on the character used. I've never really been a fan of Poser's walk designer.

[Monsieur OUXX]

@Wersus: If there's one thing I've learnt about the video games industry, it's that if you had an idea, then someone, somewhere, made the application to automate it - especially with nowadays' incredibly elaborate production pipelines.

@LimpingFish:
#1 Thanks a lot. I couldn't see a Daz3D tutorial on the web showing what I'm asking for, but I sense from the way you described it that it should be possible to create those "walk transitions" very easily.

#2 The only annoying thing with Daz3D is the non-free content. I guess Daz3D would be able to import content generated from other applications? (the kind of free content I'd have made myself )

#3 Finaly, I might be wrong, but I believe Poser is the most powerful tool to generate realistic human figures. Am I wrong?
I'm tempted to create the characters with Poser and then export them to Daz3D for the animation, but on the other hand, I believe it's always a bit tricky to import animation data from other 3D applications that have a very specific pupose or use a very specific technology (in that case: Poser for the modeling and Daz3D for the animation)  -- there's always something that goes wrong. Any suggestions on that more general matter?

[Monsieur OUXX]

Changing the topic's title to bump appropriately.