balanceRun
timesaver
Based on natural walk rythms (walk, trot, gallopp) and spring mechanics
your computer animates your character over hundreds of keyframes in a matter of seconds.
Seen the demo video ? Have a look at an introduction and basic tutorial here:
easy to use
By simply animating a follow object to guide the character.
Select the IK-targets of the feet, optionally other IK-targets to swing while walking,
set parameters like steptime or swing intensity
and hit a button to create all the keyframes.
The workflow is designed to use the least input by the user, and produce a perdictable behaviour.
This way the interface reduces to a few intuitive parameters about the walk rythm in general, that are swiftly set up and tested.
For humans, horses, insects, ...
...monsters aliens and robots, you can define up to 8 feet (ik-targets) and up to 8 additional swinging objects, a hip and a landscape to walk on.
For bipeds (two feet armature) you can also use a rigify rig to be animated.
Hiking any mesh!
Optionally you can define any mesh as a groundobject, for the feet to stand on. By rotating the targetobject, you can rotate the characters orientation. An insect may align to a steep ground, a horse cannot (it would fall over). So you can define the up-direction of your walkposes by turning your targetobject. This way you can control all motion behaviour from walking, running, climbing with just one animated target object.
You define the motion
The startingpose of your character will be used as "comfortable" pose and the rig is analyzed to retrieve the length of the legs.
That way BalanceRun fully integrates your rig into the walk algorithm.
In order to walk fluently the character wont always stick to the target object, but rather follows it as an intended point to be. Like attached to a rope. Whenever the motion comes to rest the character eases into its startingpose.
Natural secondaray motion
The hip and the swinging objects will follow the motion of the feet, getting pushed by each step and therefor add a secondary motion to them.
Spring mechanics with usual "stiffness" and "damping" parameters are implemented, in order to have simliar parameters we know from simulations in blender.
If you have anything to do with rigged characters in Blender, this product will save you plenty of time. It enourmously expands your aniamtion capacity by taking full advantage of your computers processing power and vector math to do the job.
No, you still want to adjust the animation by changing or animating the parameters, and calculate again to see the new outcome. It is shaping a first layer of your walk. Sometimes it will be necessary to manually refine keyframes, but even refining an animation is much faster, than doing all by hand. Although indeed there is nothing like it on the market at the moment.
Since 1998 has a Footstep creator tool, where you manually have to place footstes in the scene, and result in an animation, where the rig rather jumps from one foot to the other, than fluently walks along. apart from this relic of the past century, there is no comparable tool in any 3d software available other than balance run.
The code is in permanent development, and has evolved and tested itself in production for several years now. Once purchased you will access all updates of this add on for free.
Current goals and upcoming features are:
-automatic constraints setup for armatures. armatures can be analyzed and ik constraints will be setup for the feet, and other hanging limbs to speed up the rigging process to start animating.
-improved leg gathering while gallopping and jumping physics integration.
a python file to install as addon for blender 2.80+