Walk cycle

This weeks task was to create a walk cycle from a chosen reference. I went about on youtube looking for a reference to a walk. I chose to use the below woman video as my reference as she had a very odd way of moving. She leads with her head and chest. Its safe to say aswell that the woman is expressing anger through her walk so i thought this could be interesting to create.

I started by observing her highest point in the cycle and working out the time taken per step in relation to keyframe. I blocked this out, creating a shuffle like movement with the feet and blocked the arms using movement keyframes.

From this, it was more a case of getting down to the fine details of the walk. The head is position slightly forward from the mesh and leads the rest of the body. The high point is observed when the characters back foot lifts of the floor, giving him a slight boost, and lowers when the moving foot lands on the ground. After this i rendered them using movie maker and batch render on maya. I took them from a front and side view so that the walk can be better obsereved. These are the results.



Jump Cycle

Our task this week, was to find reference for a jump animation. The point of the exercise was to show that everything that moves has potential energy, and that people "prepare" or "build up" to a movement. This is particularly observed in a jump animation. 

I went on to youtube and found an animation reference of a man doing a crouching jump. I liked this as it showed alot of preperation. 

  Using this as my reference i blocked out the jump, adding in a couple more squats to show more anticipation for the characters movement. Once blocked, i began moving the arm joints, changing the facial features, moving the torso to show the shift and balance and moved the foot and leg joints to get a smooth jump arc. The final result is below.

It was very difficult to get a smooth arc to his jump and i had to add lots of movement keyframes within the joints of the body to get a full natural swing of balance. The other challenge was the knees and feet, which change rotation when airbourne. It took me a while to smooth this out so it looked natural.

Obsticle Course

This week i began creating a short obsticle course to get a better understanding of the flow of the ball in the animation so i can get a smoother video. I planned it out by making a quick sketch of places in which the ball would impact etc. and then i created the course from this. 

I liked the squash of the foam/rubber ball, so i used this as the ball within my animation. It was hard to maintain a smooth flow throughout, but by adding keyframes to follow a certain path, it eventually smoothed out to show the squash and stretch of the ball.

Squash and Stretch

Today we where shown the principles of squash and stretch. Whatever is organic must squash with an impact, and as a result, it will stretch on recoil. This was best shown using a variety of different balls. The first i used was a rubber ball which i timed when i threw it along the floor. From the timings i created a short animation demonstrated the squash and stretch.

After this i created an animation for a basket ball, once again i bounced it and timed with a stop watch the amount of bounces, time etc.

This week has shown me the importance of squash and stretch. The best way to understand these principles is by creating these simple ball animations. I will use them as a demo in my final presentation.

Rigging tutorial

Here is the Rigging tutorial i have created in order to teach people how to rig a basic humanoid mesh.

Click here for Tutorial