Custom Cycle Motor

Overview

Custom Cycle Motor is a motor designed to use your own custom captured animation and play it back in a looping animation. The most common use case for this motor is when you have your own Custom Animated Walk Cycle. You can animate a Single Non Looping walk cycle (a single step of the leg), capture that animation data and then proceed to apply that captured animation onto a group of other similar bones. The Custom Cycle Motor when installed on those bones will then automatically play back and loop your custom captured animation data, making it a very effective way to apply custom looping animation to different parts of the character.

Power of Procedural Animation with Manual Control

The Custom Cycle Motor essentially blends the advantages of Procedural Animation with that of Manual Control & Refinement. With this motor, you get to manually animate whatever animation input you want but then apply it procedurally to other bones just like the other procedural motors in Creature.

Advantages of using the Custom Cycle Motor:

• Full manual control of initial captured animation, you record whatever you want

• Very few keys to deal with, resulting in easy key management

• Applied Custom Cycle Animation automatically loops, so lengthening the animation is trivial

• Custom Cycle Animation playback has regular Cycle Motor controls, so you can easily offset the timing, adjust the speed, scale it up/down etc.

Installation Requirements

This motor requires the same order and number of bones as the captured animation data in order for it to run. For example, if you recorded a leg animation consisting of 3 bones, then the motor can also only be applied to another leg which has 3 sequential bones in it.

Usage

Using the Custom Cycle Motor requires the Pro Version of Creature.

1. The first step is to have an input animation of a set of bones ready for animation capture:

In the above image, the leg on the left has been animated and is ready for animation capture.

2. Select the bones you want to capture:

3. From the animation menu, select Capture Animation:

4. Type in a new name for the captured animation, as well as fill in the valid frame range of the animation:

5. Now select the target 3 bones of the leg on the right you want to install the Custom Cycle Motor onto:

5. Install the Custom Cycle Motor:

6. Select the motor and click on the button to the right of Animation Data. Select the captured animation you recorded in 3) to apply that animation onto your new motor:

7. That concludes the Custom Cycle Motor installation process. When you play the animation, you should see the leg on the right automatically loop and playback the recorded animation from the leg on the left.

Animatable Properties

• dispX Determines the displacement or offset of the capture data in the X direction.

• dispY Determines the displacement or offset of the capture data in the Y direction.

• scale Determines the overall physical size of the capture data, use this to scale up/down the captured bone animation.

• angle An angle rotation offset for the capture data, use this to rotate the resulting playback by a certain angular value.

• speed This determines how quickly he captured animation data plays back. (Values to try: Any value, but start with a value of 20.0 as the base default.")

• phase This determines how the capture animation starts. Use this to offset the timing of the capture cycle animation. (Values to try: Any value but try values 0 to 1.0 first.)