Having recently met my goal of getting my ProxyMan tool to work by Christmas (and rendering out a successful animation), I've since spent time tidying up loose ends of the tool just to bring the user experience up to speed. There were a couple of outstanding bits of functionality I needed to complete. I also took the opportunity to improve a few other areas to help support the user experience. For example, I extended the mapping dialog functionality, and added in a few extra commands to the motion editor dialog.
The tool is continuing to move in the right direction. I feel I've now got only one significant piece of the puzzle to solve, which is feet sliding. Feet sliding refers to the character feet not sticking to the ground properly. It's not just feet that can slip, hands and other parts of the body that contact surfaces can also suffer. But generally it's the feet, because they contact some ground surface the most.
Normally something like an inverse kinematics solution would help to plant the foot on the ground, and have the IK system correct things in-between (like the knee or elbow bend). This is the kind of solution I'm thinking of. While it is possible to use Cinema4D's own IK solutions, I tested a plain arm rig and found the IK solver to be buggy. For instance, the root joint did strange rotations at times. I'm really surprised a top level animation program couldn't get this right, considering how important character animation is. I know of a character animator who complained about Cinema4D's character system, and now I see why he made his remarks. It just didn't work the way I would expect it too. It's not bad, but there are places it just doesn't work right. At least, not in my version. So, I'm going to try and make my own solution.
And if I can find a neat solution here, it's not just sliding feet it can fix. One thing I have going for my tool here is that if I can write my own IK solver and neatly encapsulate it with my existing motion clips system, it should also conform to other properties of the clip system - such as blending controls. This would be a really useful little feature and I think it would make the little tool really powerful.
This is pretty much the last key bit of functionality I need to solve.
More to come soon.