OK guys, lots of new questions. I have no idea how to move a whole population around a corner. I'd expect, they all walk around the corner at the same time, but not where the actual corner is, but where each of the instances actually is at the moment. Hmm...
Anyway here is a small walk cycle I created by cutting a model into pieces in 3ds Max. Shadows are disabled for testing purposes.
First of all I scaled it!!!!!!!!!!! Did a test export to see if the guy has the right size.
Then I cut off the legs and the arms in Max. I put the pivot of the torso right between where the legs would be if I wouldn't have cut them off. Then the pivots of the limbs were put to the joints where they are usually connected to the body. Important: I had to place all the objects at 1,1,1, otherwise rotation wouldn't have worked for some reason (no idea why...
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In TG I imported each part into it's own population (one instance for better orientation) and moved the limbs in the object nodes at the correct places. Then I rotated the legs and the arms (X-axis) to their initial state, which is left leg and right arm forwards, the other ones backwards. I changed the positions to the opposite 15 frames later.
Now comes the fun part. I wasn't aware that you can copy keyframes in the animation editor. It was a piece of cake to copy the cycle and paste it. Like that I was able to create a 500 frames walking cycle in less than a minute for all of the limbs.
The walking cycle isn't as good as a motion capture walk of course, but given the fact, that there is no object sequence used, I think it won't look too bad at least from a distance.
AND: creating populations with an offset isn't that hard, if you just copy the whole set of populations, select all the keyframes in the animation editor, move them, let's say 7 frames backwards (for all the populations that belong together), and voilà!