For a personal project I'm working on, I have a camera flying down a city street and I would like to include an animation of a kid on a bicycle. So far, I've used the car template to rig the bicycle as best I could, using a combination of constraints and xpresso at times to attach the bike geometry to the rig. Now that I am attaching a human rig to it, I'm running into some issues I'm not sure how to resolve. I will be attaching a link to the project file, as well as a video recording below, but let me first give you some information about how the rig is set up.
-My goal with this rig is to have as much of the animation be procedural as possible i.e. path drives the bike, which moves the pedals, which moves the characters legs and arms via ik goals.
-The path drives the back wheel via the the car rig template, which drives the front wheel rotation.
-That rotation information is passed along to the bike petals. The individual pedals currently have aim constraints to keep the pedals upright as the crank rotates.
-Each character leg has an IK tag with a goal that is a child of each pedal for each foot.
Here is a link to the Project File: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLxSfLpwg7M9Fk6mWoOITbWt49pkgOxI?usp=sharing
(Im just focused on the getting the feet right first, I haven't worked on the arms yet)
It's starting to work a bit but I'm running into a few issues that you can see in the video that make the animation a bit janky. Here is a link to a screen capture of the project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXbJmVqmORw
Issues:
-The feet don't seem to follow the pedals precisely and are a bit jittery, not sure why. (Using parent constraints with generator priority.)
-The feet are turning when the path turns, I would rather them stay aligned with the pedals
-I cant figure out how to keep the feet from intersecting the pedals as seen at the end of the video. I would like to come up with a solution in xpresso to drive the angle of the feet bones and rotation of the pedals based on the position in the cycle, if possible.
Questions:
-Is this the proper, or best possible way I should be setting this up?
- How can I improve this rig?
-How can I ensure the character legs, and particularly the feet, follow the pedals as precisely as possible?
-How can I ensure based on this set up, that the feet stay aligned with the pedals even as the path turns?
-How can I modify this rig so that the characters knees don't swing so wide when the pedals rotate?