Anchor Transform Plugin Stops Feet Sliding

Anchor Transform by Robert Joosten stops feet sliding

Sliding feet can be a problem when animating a character walking.

You start off by animating a character walking on the spot, and everything looks fine. But, once you add a forward translation, to have the character move through its environment, the feet slip around and everything starts to go wrong.

Fortunately for Maya animators, Robert Joosten’s new Anchor Transform Maya plugin offers animators a simple solution.

Anchor Transform Plugin

Rather than manually tweaking your animation to stop the feet sliding, rigger Robert Joosten has come up with a Python script that lets you anchor a transform for any given time range in your animation.

How Anchor Transform Works

Not compatible with py3

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. So, no more sliding 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, significantly improving the speed of the tool. The process will copy existing in and out tangents when Anchor Transform adds new keyframes.

2024 Update
Sadly, Anchor Transform tool is not py3 (Python 3) compatible and hence does not work with newer versions of Maya.  The plugin has not yet been updated to py3. 

Free download
Robert Joosten’s Anchor Transform script is free to download from Gumroad. You can visit the page for more information.

Kevin Richards, who is using the Anchor Transform Plugin at Cloth Cat Animation in Wales, had this to say:

"Cloth Cat have brought in a very useful plugin; it welds the foot to the spot while the character is walking so you don't have to go through the palaver of trying to match move the foot against the moving world control. It saves a massive amount of time and effort."

Installation
To install the Anchor Transform plugin, follow these steps

1. First download the script from the official site. It is free, but you are given the option to pay for the service.
2. Copy the rjAnchorTransform folder to your Maya scripts directory. 
3. Then, under the Python tab in the command line, type

import rjAnchorTransform.ui 
rjAnchorTransform.ui.show()

======================
import rjAnchorTransform.ui
rjAnchorTransform.ui.show()
======================

Middle mouse drag the Python script into your shelf and create a shelf; name it "slide", or "anchr".

Video Demonstration 
To see a short demonstration of how Anchor Transform works, watch the video below:
Maya : Anchor Transform from Robert Joosten on Vimeo.

Why won't it install?
As with many free plugins, Anchor Transform can be a bit fiddly to install.
In theory, installation should pull up a user window that looks like this (see below).

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Using the Anchor Transform Plugin
To use the Anchor Transform Plugin, select the foot control. Make sure that the box "From Time Control Selection" is unchecked. Now you can type in the "Start From" box the frame you want the anchor to start from, and type in the "End From" box the frame you want it to end at.

Other free Maya Plugins
Other free Maya plugins we recommend include the TweenMachine, Studio Library, the Parent Master, and also aTools. All are free to download and install, and super helpful ways to speed up your workflow.


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