Biped gait animation with Python

No manual animation. Just a Python code.

Python. Maya. No manual animation.

Animating 3D manually takes a lot of time and effort, as well as being mathematically and physically incorrect. How to optimize this process and correct mistakes? The answer boils down to one word: Programming.

It is possible to animate in Autodesk Maya using programming. Using the correct Maya and Python syntax you can animate entire rigs from any 3D model. For this project in particular, I made the animation of the bipedal gait of a model of the human skeleton. However, I used as a foundation a software specialized in simulation and biomechanical analysis named OpenSim.

Check out this comparison between OpenSim (Left) and Maya (Right) of normal bipedal gait.

All this was thought of for those people who suffer from anomalies in their gait, for example, mild crouching and severe crouching. What OpenSim does is collect true numerical information in a text file, a file that is read by the software and translated into animation by assigning a rotation value to each joint in the corresponding frame.

I brought that text file into Maya using Python code. I also made a little user interface to make it more comfortable to do an automated animation. Then, in that interface, the data from the text file is searched for and read, unnecessary characters are removed (such as spaces and tabs) and with that the corresponding button can be selected to start making the animation.

Super special thanks to Dr. Omar Domínguez Ramírez and professor Juan Carlos Gonzáles Islas, the minds behind the project. You can read the article here.

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#Maya #Autodesk #Python #Programming #UI #OpenSim #Engineering