8: Model Reuse

If all is going well, what we have now is a HeadSeg in the Choreography with the Walk Action applied to execute using Stride Length over the some number of frames(seconds). As it executes, the legs and body will go through the Walk cycle over and over. That's all well and good, but I, at least, don't see lots of bodiless centipedes wandering around. We need some body segments. Let's say ... 5!

Drag 5 BodySeg models down on to Basic3Pt. Right now, they're all just sitting one on top of the other where the X/Y/Z axes cross (the origin). For each of the five BodySegs, do the following:

Right Click on each, choose New Constraint->Path and choose Path1. Drag the Walk action to each BodySeg. Modify it's Crop Range properties so it Starts on 0 and Ends on 29 and runs from 00:00:00 to whatever the length was for the HeadSeg in the last section (let's say 11:09 just for the sake of argument).

If we scrub the length of the animation now, what will we see? It's definitely not what we hoped for. What we've done is drop one HeadSeg and five BodySegs on to the same path, with the same starting points and ending points. So, all six segments are right on top of each other with no distance between them and all the legs going at the same time. Not right by any measure. What do we want to see? We want each segment to follow the one in front and we want the legs to fire from the front to the back with a small delay from the time the left leg on HeadSeg starts until BodySeg's leg starts, followed by BodySeg (2), BodySeg(3), etc. How are we going to get that? Well, that should be ... Ease-y (sorry, it'll make more sense in a minute).

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