THREE.JS / FOUNDATIONS 101

A walk cycle is not movement.

Compare a character that only animates, one moved by gameplay code, and one driven by an extracted motion channel. The distinction lives in the scene graph, not inside a magical animation setting.

Initializing -

Auditing the loaded clip before comparing three movement policies.

Phase: -
Body track: -
Root track: -
Clips: -

Source motion auditchecking

Study clip

Duration: -
Keyframes: -
Local position: -
Scene root: -

A glTF clip may animate a bone or body node without carrying world travel.

Visual-only playback-

The model pose changes, but its parent stays at the same world position.

World Z: -
Phase: -

This is the common “the legs move but the character does not travel” baseline.

Authored root movement-

Locomotion clip

Gameplay speed0.70

Ping-pong inside the stage

World Z: -
Phase: -
Velocity: -
Direction: -

The action supplies a phase; ordinary application code owns position, speed, boundaries, and direction.

Extracted motion channel-

Synthetic cycle distance0.80

Accumulated Z: -
Proxy Z: -
Cycles: -
Distance/cycle: -

A synthetic proxy track is sampled, its per-frame delta is accumulated on the parent, and the proxy is never presented as world travel.

Three movement policies

pose clip+phase->visual pose+root policy->world travel

The source RobotExpressive walk has a Body.position track but no scene-root position track; this study keeps that limitation visible.

global mixer speed Show skeletons

The extracted lane deliberately uses a synthetic proxy track because the source asset does not include scene-root travel. Add ?forceWebGL=1 for a WebGL2 comparison.

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LAB 101 / ROOT MOTION