Foot Matching

One of my latest work creations came about after reading through a post-mortem on Ratchet and Clank. But, it will only be a valid solution, if the characters you're animating are going to remain in the same place...so, animating over the origin in Maya or Max or what have you.

It consists of a simple window, in which you can input the desired walk or run speed of a character, and the distance in which their legs are spread during the cycles. It then proceeds to create footprints of your character in a line, like on a treadmill, moving at the specified rate. It doesn't necessarily match the stride length of the character, since that will vary too much to put into a script. BUT, it will give us a reference for how quickly the feet should be moving to match the translation in game. This will eliminate a LOT of the guess and check work, and should move things along nicely. And, it was fun to get cracking into the code again.