Let's start in a pose from which a pivot step is natural. Load the DojoBot into choreography.  Create an action and apply the defensive pose from the Stance tutorial.  Apply the action to the choreography.

Just for the sake of argument, let's animate a forward pivot step.  The left foot is currently advanced, so DojoBot will base his weight on the left foot, and swing the right foot around and into position in front of the left.  This will bring him a single pace forward and (far more importantly) would allow him to direct the entire power of his body into a move on his right side (a punch, for instance).

To pull off the pivot step convincingly, the body will have to turn fairly uniformly.  To do this, we will be rotating the Patriarch bone (which will rotate the pelvis, and all targets... in fact, the whole model).

The problem is that we would like to rotate around the line of the left foot, but the Patriarch is located in the middle of the body.  So, we'll just have to move it.

Unhide the Patriarch bone, and the Patriarch Compensator bone.  Go to the action window and go to top view.

When we move the Patriarch to the left foot, everything is going to move with it.  So we have to record -now- where everything is located.



Click in the ruler section of the side of the window.  This will create a marker (a thin line either horizontally or vertically across the window).  Move the marker so that it intersects the base of the left foot target.  Now choose the other side of the window (top or bottom if  you had chosen left or right, and vice versa).  Create a marker to pinpoint the left foot target in the other axis.  Now you will know where the left foot target should be, even when the Patriarch causes it to move.



Do the same for the location of the Patriarch Compensator (in the middle of the body).



Now you are ready to move the Patriarch.  Select the Patriarch bone.  Set the keyframe settings to Single-Bone, Translate only.  On frame 1, click keyframe to save the location.  Go to frame 2 and translate the Patriarch to the point you had marked over the left foot target.  Notice that the entire body moves with it, which is not what we want.



Go back to frame 1.  Select the Patriarch Compensator.  Keyframe its position.  Go to frame 2 and translate the Compensator back to the point you had marked over the center of the body.  Notice that the entire body (except for the Patriarch bone) moves back to its original position.



Next Page
Back to Dojo