Deactivating Footsteps
 
 
 

When you change the position or timing of active footsteps, the biped's animation changes accordingly, causing the biped to step into the footsteps in their new positions with the new timing.

Deactivating footsteps temporarily suspends changes to animation when footsteps are changed. When you move deactivated footsteps or change their timing, the biped still continues to do the same motion it did before footsteps were deactivated.

Footsteps should be deactivated when you make substantial changes to footstep timing or placement.

Footsteps are deactivated by selecting footsteps and clicking (Deactivate Footsteps) on the Footstep Operations rollout.

After making changes to the footsteps, click (Create Keys For Inactive Footsteps) in the Footstep Operations rollout. This will recreate keys for the biped and cause it to follow the footsteps.

Active footsteps are pale in color, while inactive footsteps are brightly colored. This coloring appears both on footstep icons in viewports and on footstep keys in the Dope Sheet.

NoteDeactivating and reactivating footsteps causes all biped keys to be replaced with default animation keys for the current footstep pattern and timing.

When to Deactivate Footsteps

There are many situations where you will want or need to deactivate footsteps after activating them.

Activation/Deactivation Workflow

The fastest workflow with footsteps is to deactivate footsteps and make changes, reactivate footsteps and play the animation to check your work, and repeat this process until the footstep timing and placement are correct. However, deactivating and reactivating footsteps replaces any biped keys with the default animation for the current footstep pattern and timing.

For this reason, it is recommended that you work with footsteps exclusively first, ignoring the upper body animation, and deactivate and reactivate footsteps as needed. When the motion of the feet is perfect or near-perfect, only then should you adjust the biped animation manually. Otherwise, you will lose all your manual animation work every time you deactivate and reactivate footsteps.

TipAlternatively, you can use layers to store any upper body animations you want to preserve while you proceed with changes in your biped's footsteps.

Rules for Inactive Footsteps

When you click deactivate footsteps, only selected footsteps are deactivated. If you haven't made any changes to the default animation, it is recommended that you deactivate all footsteps. However, if you've changed or added animation keys to part of the animation, you might want to deactivate only a portion of the footsteps.

When some but not all footsteps are currently deactivated, limitations are imposed on the changes you can make to footsteps:

Procedures

To deactivate footsteps:

  1. Select the footsteps to deactivate.

    The footsteps you select must be in sequence; you cannot deactivate a nonsequential set of footsteps.

  2. On the Footstep Operations rollout, click (Deactivate Selected Footsteps).

    The footsteps are deactivated. Viewports and the Dope Sheet display them in bright colors again.

See Also