Cyclist Mechanics

So, a few people have asked me how I built the Cyclist animation from last week no IK involved.

So the man himself is just a puppet tool rig split into a few layers (2 legs, 2 arms and torso).

The rotational stuff is quite simple, but the knees pivot from the ankles that use a sin expression to alter their angle and keep the legs constant length when bent. You can see the angle created by this expression on the pedals.

The head and shoulders use a simple sin positional expression to bob with slight 30 degree offsetting to create secondary motion.

This allows the entire rig to run off the rotation of the crank.