Robert Joosten’s New Tool Lets Animators Anchor Transform to World Space for a Given Time Range

Sliding feet are always an issue to look out for when animating a character walk or walk cycle. Rather than tweaking animated attributes, Rigging Artist Robert Joosten has come up with a script for Maya that lets you anchor a transform for any given time range in your animation. Anchor Transform was designed to be an easy to use tool that can be used to plant feet firmly on the ground when animating walks or runs. Not more sliding or skating feet.

Anchor Transform uses the Maya API to calculate new local space attributes. That means that it doesn’t have to loop over the frames and that significantly improves the speed of the tool. The process will copy existing in and out tangents when Anchor Transform adds new keyframes.

Joosten’s Anchor script is free to download, visit the page for more information.