Holy Briefs Batman? Another Walk Cycle?
We got an actual Brief for these two walk cycles. Basically we had footage recorded of us pacing up and down doing ‘a walk’. I did ‘my walk’. It is a pretty casual walk, yet quite quick partly because I have a fairly long stride.
Since this was to be a walk cycle, I had to analyze my reference footage carefully to pick out the essential aspects and subtleties (that word doesn’t look like it is spelt right? It is though, I googled it) of my walking style, then possibly exaggerate them. I decided to break the video down to some key movements and overlapped them to get an idea of how my body ‘flows’, as you can see in the image above.
Something I noticed about my walk is that I literally dump my raised armed down at the passing stage. You can get a feel of the drop impact from how my wrist movement flies back. Also, my feet never come far off the ground. I almost drag the toes along the floor. It is a pretty lazy walk, with the drive really behind the legs and all other limbs are just pulled along.
The chap I used for animating is called Boy, he is not a physical likeness of myself by any means, but I think he ended up moving a lot like me. He had a pretty gay purple shirt on when I got him, but I changed that in favour of something that suited me a little more.
I’m fairly happy with the walk, I’m not too sure what else I would of done to it, without getting some feedback first. The head movement is a tad jerky again, but not as bad as my previous cycle. The leg movement is pretty smooth, though I’m fairly confident with the legs and feet. The upper body is what I feel I need to concentrate on most. It is quite amazing how much a bit of practice can help you improve.
The traditional 2D walk cycle was numbing as ever and took probably 4 or 5 times as long as my 3D walk cycle to complete. Which would be fine if it was 4 or 5 times as good, or even just comparably good, but it is not.
Something I should of kept an eye on is the size of his head, it looks like a tumor or an alien is rocking back and forth inside of it . Also the leg furthest away is a lot stiffer and possibly shorter at times. In fact the whole body is very stiff, which my walk is definitely not. My walk has casual swing and ultimate style. This guy looks like he is about to collapse and die. Ultimately I’m not convinced it looks much like my walk, or in fact, have any of the aspects I wanted to exaggerate. Sure it is someone walking, but it isn’t me.
Or is it? I’ve been staring at it for days, so I’m not viewing it with fresh eyes. You know why the comment box is down below people. Give me feedback.
Edit – something which Andy pointed out is his forward leaning movement is too exaggerated, which is oh so true.
Roy
December 8th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
[...] Holy Briefs Batman? Another Walk Cycle? [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I hope Richard is managing to comprehend walk cycle as an animation term, maybe you should animate a walk, swim, cycle? This is more than a passing resemblance to your walk, the change in head height through a walk cycle is interesting, there seems to be rather a lot of compression on the neck in your sketch for the down position, this can’t be healthy.
Steve´s last blog post..Frenzy in the ball pool
December 9th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Nice spot on the neck crushing in that sketch! I didn’t realise. I could try a swim cycle and a cycle cycle. I plan to try out a few different cycles over Christmas perhaps.
Might try and find an animal rig too, to see how hard it is to animate 4 legs (apparently a horse is the ultimate in walk cycles).
December 13th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Yet another very interesting blog. I am amazed with the ‘boy’ walking how do you do it? I must get Julie to look at your blog if she is not doing so already.
P.S. Good(or sad)to see my ignorance has influenced comment.
December 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
P.S. Julie has been checking out your blog – and is impressed.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
I may do an article on how 3D animation actually works. Basically for a character you have an invisible skeleton inside the model, called a rig, which you allows you to control each limb individually (move, rotate, etc). You then just adjust the positioning at the appropriate times (frames) on the timeline.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Great work man! I’m thinking of dropping my fine art course and trying for illustration or animation. :O
December 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
wheres his fingers ?hows he gonna change gears if he has no fingers ?
twisted´s last blog post..father Christmas surfing,santa,Tony Plant
December 18th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Burl,
Any particular reason you want to change to one of those courses? Your paintings are excellent, so it would interesting to see those skills applied to animation. If I was better at it, I’d love to do illustration. Get that blog going again man!
Tony,
He has no eyes either, so I couldn’t even place him behind the wheel of an automatic. I really didn’t think this through.