What's the best method to turn a character left/right without a slipping feet?

Question

I tried the Follow Path constraint and it works well when the character moves in a straight line. When he turns left or right, the foot slips or slides. How can I stop him from skiing?

Creating a particular action for turning left or right:

This method has the highest quality animation and the best physics as it's not an automated process. Since it's a human-made (keyframe by keyframe), it may require some time and effort and I'm a lazy person.

I feel like I can take an advantage of the walking cycle that I already made and simply rotate the armature (on its local axes by an empty or something similar). This may have less quality animation and that's okay for me since it's a little faster. At the same time, I wouldn't like it to have a poor looking sliding foot.

My test file:

I made this file for experimenting purposes. The sliding feet appears in curved places. You can download it here: https://filebin.net/zz66k7lujql2bk1c

Answer 1

When you see that the walk cycle doesn’t work anymore I guess you have no other solution than put a new action above your walk cycle in the NLA.

• First I would make the armature differently: Create a root bone on the bottom, make it the parent of controllers, pole targets and of the spine base (current root). This way you’re free to move your spine up and down during the walk.

• Prepare a walk cycle with no slipping, there are several methods, I guess it’s too long to explain here.

• Don’t give your root the Follow Path constraint, give it to your armature object. After that, select the curve, go in the Graph Editor, unfold Evaluation Time, in the N panel remove the Generator modifier.

• To set the speed of the walk along the curve, play with the curve's Evaluation Time value in Object Data > Path Animation, and, in the NLA, play with the action clip's Scale (NLA N panel > Action Clip > Playback Settings).

• Once you’re good with the speed, look at the moment where you need to fix the slipping, for example where the curve turn is too narrow, put the time vertical bar at this frame.

• Create a copy of your walk cycle in the Dopesheet. In the NLA, select the strip with the walk cycle, press ShiftA > Select the new action, it creates a new strip in a new track.

• Select the new strip, press Tab, go in the Dopesheet, edit the action so that the feet don’t slip. In the 3D View You can copy paste the pose from the previous walk cycle to have a logical transition between this walk cycle and the new action.