All Things Digitigrade Legs
By
AkuTenshiiZero,
Posted on: 2010-05-30 10:33 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Sam, your model works fine for all animations where only the hip and heel positions are crucial. I'm worried about what happens in animations where the knee position matters. The case I'm most worried about is the /em kneel position, which has the heel quite close to and somewhat behind the hip, which could shove the digitigrade knee into the floor depending on the angles.
It occurs to me that I could probably create a Lego model of the plantigrade/digitigrade rig pictured and play around with it to see what happens in various cases. I'd need to add a little extra rigging to ensure that the digitigrade knee and ankle angles were the same. Then I can try moving the plantigrade leg into the various positions that it goes into in our animations and see what happens to the digitigrade leg.
@SPTrashcan
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That could actually be calculated. A kneeling position is largely predictable, especially if we ignore the upright leg which shouldn't cause problems. My guess is that the Digitigrade knee won't actually touch the ground, if for no reason other than because the digitigrade shin is shorter in my calculation. I don't see why you can't make it the same length, but it would accordion the digitigrade legs far too much pretty much constantly.|
Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Sam, your model works fine for all animations where only the hip and heel positions are crucial. I'm worried about what happens in animations where the knee position matters. The case I'm most worried about is the /em kneel position, which has the heel quite close to and somewhat behind the hip, which could shove the digitigrade knee into the floor depending on the angles.
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It also occurs to me that we want the sum of the digitigrade thigh, shin and foot to be at least around 10-20% longer than the sum of the plantigrade thigh and shin, just to ensure the digitigrade leg can stand up without hyperextending. By my eyeball calculation, that would put one digitigrade bone being 4/5 of each plantigrade bone.
Actually, I don't think I need to run the numbers. In a kneeling position with plantigrade legs, the distance between the pelvis and the ground is the length of the plantigrade thigh (hip to knee), and the length of the digitigrade thigh is defined as shorter than that of the plantigrade thigh. As such, the knee will not sink into the ground.
The problem is that the plantigrade TOES might be up in the air
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I've always found the design of the old cartoon Gargoyles to be pretty good.
For the most part, the heel is pretty low. Somehow, this seems to make more sense to me in terms of balance. Then again, I'm certainly no expert in the subject. Interestingly, they're shown to be quite fast and move more naturally on all fours, which I think is a very realistic concept.
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That's exactly what bothers me about that design - with the heel as low as it is, they don't look like digitigrade legs, they just look like someone with big feet. Easier to draw and identify with, I suppose, as they look a lot more human, but the point in wanting digitigrade legs to begin with is wanting something that is clearly, obviously and unmistakably NOT human. At least that's what draws me to them.|
Originally Posted by AkuTenshiiZero
For the most part, the heel is pretty low. Somehow, this seems to make more sense to me in terms of balance. Then again, I'm certainly no expert in the subject. Interestingly, they're shown to be quite fast and move more naturally on all fours, which I think is a very realistic concept.
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That's kind of why I like the HOMM5 Succubus and the Drenai so much - they kind of look like humans, they kind of move like humans, they kind of stand like humans... But then they kind of don't. It's that sense of weirdness about them which makes them enticing and interesting, and "big feet" just don't have the same impact. That's actually why I ABHOR the Champions Online Monster Legs - they look almost exactly like human legs. Ugly human legs, but human legs just the same. They even end on a little shoe.
Non-human parts need to be clearly non-human. That's what they're for. At least that's how I feel.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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You know, I hate to necro my own thread, but I figured that was still better than starting a new one. I won't recap everything that happened, but I will explain the following:
Currently, in-game digitigrade legs for players operate the same as normal legs do, bit with a lower leg swap, meaning the knee on Monster Legs is in the same place as the knee on normal legs. I went over options to alter this, such as to move the digitigrade knee up and place the digitigrade heel where the knee is right now, and people told me that wouldn't be workable in City of Heroes. Though I generally agreed, here's something I just spotted not 5 minutes ago:
Now, I don't know what it is about them and whether they have the wrong knee in the wrong place or such, but this is pretty much exactly what I had in mind earlier in the thread. Their legs look SO MUCH BETTER than ours I don't know what to say. Can we have legs like these?
*edit*
Crap... I probably should have posted this in the All Things Art thread...
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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They look a bit broken to me.
My benchmark for those type of legs has always been Nemesis the Warlock - especially Kev O'Neil's original and Bryan Talbot's slightly more realistic rendering.
I'm having trouble finding a Talbot, but here's a good example of O'Neil:
http://www.2000adonline.com/2000ad/m...iginal/230.jpg
/edit
Still can't find a Talbot image, but I stumbled across this sculpture of the character which seems to capture the essence of what I think works in the legs:
http://i36.tinypic.com/favo0y.jpg
Going back to one of the earlier posts where you show a diagram with the leg split into 3 equal lengths - Nemesis and the image above have it more the way I think of it - with the central section much shorter. The angle looks wrong in the image above though where the lower knee (the ankle) is at the same level as or slightly higher than the upper knee.
It's probably fair to say the thing I like most about the Nemesis legs is the elegance - the tapering - they look like horse legs rather than dog legs (although those do taper a lot in real life too) or traditional over-muscled werewolf legs; if I use the monstrous legs at all, I never use the large ones.
Personally, it's exactly the tapering that really bugs me about these pictures. I cannot stand tiny legs and tiny feet, especially with a normal-sized torso. It just looks awkward to me. That's why Dexter's Mom always bugged me so much
Going back to the Tautha, I actually like their digitigrade legs the best of all that I've seen in the game. Yeah, it's a bit awkward to have their knee and heel at the same level, and it does look a bit off, but it's exactly this "offness" that makes me like them so much. Digitigrade legs on bipedal humanoids do not exist in real life, which is why the weirder they look in games and fiction, the more I like them.
The Tautha legs are honestly my favourite in the game by FAR. I should look for a few Council War Wolves to have a look at theirs, but I like them far, far more than those we have access to. If I could use those for my characters, I would.
Now, I'm not sure how those are rigged and if they work with player animations, but if they do... I want 'em!
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Bumping this thread with this image from Splice.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_nRZ0imY8tI.../splice3-1.jpg
Anatomically I know it doesn't work. The foot/hand? doesn't appear to have enough support, but it looked cool.
Yeah, that's the sort of anatomy I was looking for, one where the digitigrade foot is upright when the leg is standing upright, potentially with a bend in the knee and ankle. That's a lot like the Tautha pic I posted (way back when), too.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Wouldn't you also have to alter the hips/pelvis of a biped digitigrade creature? I seem to recall that a bird or dinosaur pelvis is canted forward, while ours is mostly vertical.
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If you wanted to be anatomically correct, I suppose. I don't think it's necessary, though. So long as it doesn't look horrible, I'm pretty sure any kind of pelvis will work.|
Originally Posted by Ironik
Wouldn't you also have to alter the hips/pelvis of a biped digitigrade creature? I seem to recall that a bird or dinosaur pelvis is canted forward, while ours is mostly vertical.
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Besides, if we alter the human pelvis too much, we'll lose the ability to add sexy butts
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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The equations I gave are actually a (VERY rudimentary) way of calculating how a digitigrade leg would look if it had the same footing as the corresponding plantigrade leg in any animation. This, obviously, does not account for the full range of motion of the digitigrade leg, but given the alternative, I'll take it.