I have created a quadruped walk animation which seems to work quite nicely (small miracle for me). Now, I've searched the forums for posts on the topic, and found only a few, and no real answers.
The main issue I'm having really is with limb attachments. My body will be invisi'd out, and the limbs (think something like a horse) visible prims. Course, the main problem with making our human avs walk like a horse is the joint setup - the knees and elbows are not at the same height. The only way I've managed to get close to this has left me with a TINY av, which isn't really ideal. Other than that, whilst attached hind legs work great (on my correctly scaled real legs), I'm having trouble attaching the upper and lower forelegs so that they'll move together at the correct joint.
I've tried parenting the attachments to a prim positioned on my actual limb, but can't seem to get that working - it does seem like it might be key, though. And I'm getting very grumpy about the fact that attached prims don't appear to rotate around their parent - for example, the head which is parented by a (soon-to-be invisible) sphere on the the avatar, insists on rotating around what appears to be its heaviest point, and not the sphere, with the result that when my head moves too far in any one direction, the neck becomes seperated.
I'm thinking there must be people who have made exciting avatars with limbs in odd positions and come up against (perhaps solved) the same issues. Am I missing something? Is there a solution to this? I don't want to end up with a tiny av because the legs and arms have to be the same length and the arms won't go any longer. Does anyone have any clues as to how I can build the front legs so they'll move correctly as the arms move, even though they're a different scale/position to the 'real' limbs?
This isn't something I've tried before so any advice or discussion would be appreciated!