Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 8-9
Assignment goal… create a “Vanilla” walk cycle… I’ve been walking for almost 57 years… I thought I had it down… And then I tried to animate it… And got my ass kicked LOL.
I’m bunching weeks 8 and 9 together. This is our first “big” assignment and they’ve split it into two weeks. Week 8 is planning and blocking, with week 9 splining and polish.
What is a “vanilla walk”? It’s a plain old walk that a basic character would do. Nothing special, no personality or quirks. Nothing to indicate mood or physical states like exhaustion or injury.
A walk can be broken into 5 basic poses that repeat on each leg…
note… these poses are split apart in space to see them clearly, but when you’re creating them, the feet on the ground are overlapped.
A “normal” adult takes about 1 second to complete two full steps, so our project needs to show the cycle for 2 seconds or 48 frames since we’re animating at 24 frames per second.
Wk 08 - Phase 1 - Planning
I decided to use the image above as my pose reference, but to really get my head around the poses, I took the time to draw each one out.
This process really helped me understand the feet… I think that is the hardest part of walkiing a character. If the feet don’t make contact with the ground and stick in a convincing way, the character will seem to “float” along the ground and the illusion is broken.
Wk 08 - Phase 2 - Blocking Poses
With a decent amount of preparation, I moved into blocking out the poses using stepped keyframes. That means no interpolated motion between each pose. It was much harder than I thought it would be. The feet were definitely challenging and the movement of the feet creates noticeable jerks and pops in the rest of the character if you don’t get them right.
Knees were something I didn’t anticipate, but proved to be the part that kicked my ass the hardest. “Knee pop” is a simptom of parts of the character moving from pose to pose incorrectly, and it took a lot of time to get those smoothed out. Tracing the position of the knees is a great visual technique that helps identify those pops…
Once I had the knees smoothed out, the walk was looking pretty good!
This is what I turned in for week 08
In past weeks, I would have jumped ahead to the next step and turned in more than I was supposed to, but the process of getting to this point was wayyyyyyyyyyyyy harder than I thought it would be, so I cut my losses and waited for feedback.
Week 09 - The reckoning
I figured that my instructor would rip it apart and I was right LOL… Tim really honed in on my weight transfers and rotations giving me some valuable insight into what was missing…
Tim Ingersoll giving amazing feedback
My walk was “too vanilla” LOL… My blocked out animation was missing any kind of weight transfer from one foot to the other. You can really see that in the front view above. The character is does shift left and right, but not nearly enough.
I had to refine my stepped animation before I could move on to splining and refinement. Here’s how it changed…
Note how much further left and right the body moves in the front view? This created a much more correct weighted planting of the foot. It also meant my knees started popping again, and it took a looooooooong time to get them smooth enough move onto splining and smoothing the animation.
Here’s what I turned in…
It’s a big improvement, and the instructor only and a couple of small comments on the motion, but not enough to warrant re-doing anything!
The heels where the hardest part of this refining process, but we’ll talk more abuot heels for weeks 10-11 !!
Wk - 09 - Pose Assignment
As if the walk wasn’t hard enough, we also had to do a pose with the theme “Balance”. I looked at a lot of martial arts and gymnastics pics as reference.
As usual I did more than one. BUT, because the walk refinement took so much time, I kinda rushed through the poses, and it shows… next time I’m only doing ONE dammit!!
Sketches…
Poses…
This one has real problems with weight distribution and line of action. If I would have slowed down, I might have noticed that.
This one has better weight distribution, but needs more “personality” particularly in the chest and legs.
Whew… that was a lot of stuff, but I learned soooooooo much these last couple weeks, and it’s going to help me on the next assignment… Personality walk!
