Frustration

Ok... I'm getting a bit tired of mr. delgo here, but I'm getting close to the end of the chapter, only another section on rigging and animating a walk cycle to go, and then I get to go back to modeling (yay!). I've been working on the IKs recently, which has been interesting, but wayyyy over my head for the majority of it, by which I mean, I understand what I'm supposed to do, but I wouldn't be able to figure out how to design this myself. Anyway, here's a screenshot of some driven keys for making the feet move naturally so when the ankle is lifted, the toes stay on the ground kind of thing...


Then I moved on to constraining the wrists, which was where I ran into problems, because one wrist worked fine, but when I tried to do the EXACT same thing on the other wrist, it totally screwed up and the wrist bent back on itself and all sorts of bad things. I know what the problem is (the manipulator isn't rotating the wrist in the same axes as itself) but I can't figure out how to fix it, because I did do exactly the same thing both times and all the attributes look the same (and no, it's not a mirroring problem, but thanks for suggesting it...). Anyway, then maya crashed, and so I'm going to take a break from that for a bit. Delgo may end up having only one animated wrist, but we'll see how things go. I really don't want to get too hung up on one section when I have so many areas left to cover in this very basic introduction to the software. I'm not sure I'll finish the book by the 21st, so I may download the 30-day trial again (shhh, don't tell) because I haven't yet been able to evaluate all the areas (eg dynamics, animation, nurbs, paint effects etc).

Anyways, wish me luck...
Stuart