Royzy's Art and Design Blog Roll

That goes out to you triathlon obsessed types.

The walk cycle is the latest of the 3D exercises we have undertaken. Learning to walk again is actually very interesting, unless you are doing it traditionally frame by frame on paper. At that point for me it is very tedious and frustrating. I am pretty pleased with my 3D walk cycle, hence why I am putting it at the top of this post. Put the nasty stuff at the bottom, we don’t care about that right now. Something not taken into consideration when making this walk is the gender. The character is non-specific, regardless of her the thing’s looks.

There is ultimately 5 stages in ‘the walk’:

1. Contact
2. Down
3. Passing
4. Peak Point
5. Contact

Oh yes, you read right. Contact appeared twice. That is because you need to return to the contact position (though your back foot is now your front) in order for the walk to continue. Makes sense eh? Then you do the stages again to your original position. Then repeat on a loop. See now, we are moving. Below is an image courtesy of Idleworm.

Below you can see my walk cycle. I’m quite pleased with the movement, although her upper body looks a little bit jerky. Not a great deal of subtleties either. This is something I will try and iron out of the walk cycle where I animate my own walk cycle of myself. The walk itself is a very typical walk, with no emotion intended. Looks a bit like a very young walk, in my opinion.

Not a Walk Cycle

Below is not a walk cycle and it is not very good at all (but I uploaded it anyway, for you to analyze). A walk cycle loops the same movements again and again on the spot. Imagine picking up a person by their head as they walk and watching their legs spinning in the air like they are still walking. That is a walk cycle. Below the character is actually being moved across the scene (in an admittedly weird stomping stiff backed kinda way). I really should of spent more time on it, but after doing my walk cycle first, I confused myself with the process and got a bit tired of it. If I did it again I would have a much better idea of what to do though and would be quicker at it.

So ok, why not just do a walk cycle instead of animating every single step of action? Surely that way you save a lot of time? Well, a walk cycle doesn’t look natural and is very easy to pick up on, because the movement is EXACTLY the same for every step, like a robot. Every step in real life is different, even if only slightly. When to use a walk cycle then? In a video game or if you are being a lazy animator.

Traditional 2D Walk Cycle

Urrrrh. Wasn’t into this traditional malarkey much, I can tell you now. Mainly because I don’t like the fact I have to draw each frame, then put them together in StopMotion Pro to find out I needed to tweak something, just a tiny bit, then have to redraw that part on each frame. Usually I won’t bother, because I would go insane. It is very tedious and time consuming for myself. It isn’t the medium I don’t like, it is just the process. It feels like the process halts the progress, particularly because I am not a fast drawer anyway and I like to pay attention to detail. With this I can’t. I just thought I’d put that out there now. I do like watching traditionally animated films, but not making them.

Below are the first 2 traditional walk cycles I did. The first is pretty nasty! For a start, I only animated half of the walk and thought nobody would notice once it was looped. Well you can clearly see it took about 5 minutes, last thing on a Monday night.

I am ashamed, particularly because I forgot I had to upload it onto my blog for you to see. I’m sorry, my third traditional walk cycle is a lot better (will be in the next post I do).

Then below I attempted sneaking. Not great, doesn’t feel like it has any weight to it. I based the movement on my imagination of someone sneaking, rather than from reference. This was probably a mistake, because the sneak looks kind of creepy. Weight is something I hopefully sorted out in my third traditional walk cycle (one of myself). Bet you can’t wait to see it. Edit: – You can now see my latest [ walk cycle ] post.

Well those are my first attempts at walk cycles. 1 out of 4 I find acceptable. Think I better try harder next time. I’ll quickly write my next walk cycle post. Oh yeah, to finish, look at this first thing we did in Maya at the start of term, not walking, but jumping.

Not much weight in that either. What I am glad about though is that I can see a big improvement as I complete each exercise we have done. I think that is why I am a bit surprised at the work above, because I have improved since and can now see where I went very wrong.

Roy

December 8th, 2008 | Tags: 3D walk cycle, Digital Animation, learning to walk, traditional 2D walk cycle, walk cycle | Category: Animation Principles | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL