There were a few problems with my first Zaku Kai walk cycle (I’d messed up a keyframe which caused the left leg to intersect the foot during the stride – and additionally the animation had an excess of hip movement) so I did a new one and rendered it properly. It turns out rendering on my machine at work is a whole lot faster than the machine at home – rendering the walk cycle at home took a good chunk of an hour (single core, 1.8 GHz, etc.) while at work (four cores, 2.8GHz, etc.) it took a couple of minutes…
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For this walk cycle I also tweaked the armature a bit to get better interaction between the lower leg and the foot. Specifically I added a pole target to the leg’s IK chain (which was kind of a pain, since pole targets apparently make the negative X direction of the bone point at the target – and on my armature X is always the main direction of movement for a bone – meaning the X axis for the leg bone (which bends front-to-back) points to the side… Additionally, the pole targets for both the left and right legs had to be placed to the left of the foot… I also moved the ankle joint (the point where the leg bone ends and the location of the IK target for the leg) a bit forward and down so that when the leg tilts forward the leg will clear the top of the foot.<\/p>\n