Retime Legs and Hips
Carrying the pelvis retime down into the legs, making the foot slide read naturally, and counter rotating controllers against each other.
With the pelvis behaving, the same treatment moves down into the legs. This is the video where the turn stops being a root moving in space and starts being a body with feet on the ground.
What the video covers
Continuing the pelvis work, adjusting its orientation speed, then moving to the legs: rotational speed, and easing into and out of each position. Making the foot slide look like a genuine pivot rather than a glitch. Counter rotating two controllers against one another to get an effect neither produces alone. Working with the sliders the foot control offers, and cleaning the result up in the graph editor.
The ideas doing the work
A slide has to be motivated. Feet do slide during a turn, but a real slide happens because the body is pivoting over a planted contact, and it decelerates as weight settles onto it. A slide at constant speed reads as an error, which is why this is worth a section of its own.
Counter rotation is how you get around a single control's limits. Rotating one controller one way while its parent or child goes the other produces shapes and speeds that neither can reach alone. It is also the mechanism behind contrapposto, so the same technique that fixes a foot pivot is the one that makes a standing pose look alive.
Foot sliders exist to save you from over-keying. The controls the rig offers for roll, bank and pivot are there so that contact behaviour can be adjusted without rebuilding the leg. Reaching for them first is usually faster and always cleaner.
The graph editor is where retiming is finished. Moving keys in the timeline gets the beats right; the curves decide what happens between them. Both are required.
What to watch for
- The planted foot. Even during a pivot it should not travel across the floor without reason.
- Rotational easing. Legs decelerating into a plant and accelerating out of it is what makes weight read.
- Counter rotation getting away from you. Check the pose against something a body could actually hold.
- Curves after every timing change. Moving keys reshapes the interpolation between them, usually not in the way you wanted.