How to Eliminate Foot Sliding in Game Animation
Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
Foot sliding plagues almost every animation system, and there's no single fix. I share a practical recipe: use a two-bone IK solver to place the heel, orient the toe, and clamp against the ground. Then lock the toe during contact states with inertialization, automatically detect contact times, and optionally clean up sliding offline. The full source code is available on GitHub.
Undoubtedly this topic is much more of an art than a science - which might explain why it isn't always easy to find resources on it - and why it gets less attention in the academic sphere.
- simonebrunozzi
Wow, after a lot of code, the animations at the bottom of the article are really mind-blowing. Super well done.
- mmastrac
This is one of the best references on this topic I've seen - run cycles and foot locking are annoyingly lacking in documentation outside a few papers.
- windriverthrum
Such beautiful animations. Too much detail is missing from this post and its related post on "two-joint inverse kinematics" (that is actually three joint inverse kinematics) - what are the joint types? which inverse kinematics problem is being solved (position, orientation, or both?). This could be a great post if the author spends some more time polishing it.