Research:
Walk animation is an important part of 3d animation practice. Walk animation can be veriable depending on the characters emotions, jobs and other elements, and it is the fundation of character running, sitting and other related animations. Therefore, the practice of walk animation should follows the whole life of an animator.
For 2d animation, the walk cycles can be separated into four basic stages: Forward Contact Point, Recoil, Back Contact Point, and High Point. This method can also be applied into 3D area. In 3d walk animation, 4 key poses are required:
In a normal walk cycle animation a character takes two steps in 1 second (24 frames). But the first and the last step hook up into the same pose so that it can be looped again and again.
It is important that each part of character should be active to make the character walking lively. The highest point of the character should also be a fluent curve (more like a sin/cos curve), the weight point of the body should keeping up and down/shift to right or left during the whole animation to keep balance and energy.
Challenge 6 (Part 1): Walk Cycle Blocking & Emotional walking
Following with the timing and key poses guidance, I made a rough blocking walk cycle.
In this part, adjusting key poses to avoid knee popping is quite important.
- Rough-blocking walk cycle:
- Emotional walk:
I animated a walking alien warrior. He whips out his weapons and then walks quickly towards his enemy. I tried to make him looks angry. His upbody leans quite forward and maintains sharp vigilance.
Challenge 6 Part 2: Walk Cycle Splining & Clean Up
After roughly blocked the walking animation, I added body squash & stretch, cleaned the graph editor and made a moving forward walking cycle. I used copy and paste to drive my character moving forward and used locators to check whether cahracter’s feet are located in the right positions.
I then added lights, cameras and ground to better demonstrate this animation. Below is the version01 of my walking cycle:
Alan told me that the sense of weight is not enough, which means the body movement should be more apparent. Therefore, I exaggerate and adjust the body movements on Y axis (world Y). I also add some squash and stretch on character’s legs to avoid knees’ popping when character moving forward.
Below is the final result: