Assignment 2 - Walk Cycle Animation

This is how I created a walk cycle animation of a character.

Process:

Firstly, I created a motion trail for my character's hips. This would allow me to refer to the motion trial for a more smooth and flowy movement of the hips and that the character moves at a standard and good pace.

Next, I animated the upper part of the body first. The upper part of the body is important as it defines the way in which the character moves and is the main focus of the animation. This made the legs stretch to a impossible extent.

I then animated the legs one by one. As you can see from the motion trial, it looks like a sine graph that you would find. It looks wavy and systematic. Therefore, for every key pose, with the help of the grid, I placed the feet at the exact same position, just that the translation of the feet is different for every grid box. This makes sure that the character's hips does not overtake the legs in terms of speed.

After that, I animated the hands. First, the shoulders, then the elbow and lastly the hands. I decided to give it a more natural feel.

Next, I animated the hips to give weight shift. This would make the animation more realistic and less robotic. The hips would then lean towards the leg that is sticking out and the weight would be focused on it.

Finally, as an added bonus, I animated the head. From the movement of the head, you can see that the character is looking for something, or he is lost and is looking for directions.

This is the storyboard of my walk cycle animation:

This is the playblast of my walk cycle animation:

Reflection

This exercise was probably one of the hardest I have ever faced. The final product seemed rushed because I redid the animation twice. Not once, but twice. This is because the first two times, the animations was too slow and the character looked too floaty and unrealistic. I was pretty much quite unhappy when i was told I need to redo because I had done all the hands and weight shift and all that effort has been put to waste. However, with each iteration, I did better work than the previous one. My final one looks better than all my previous iterations too. Also, I had at first made the hip movement very extreme by making the up and down movements of the upper body too much. Thus, by using an editable motion trail, I have made it look less extreme and more realistic. This exercise has taught me the basics of character animation and how to make a character look realistic. Overall, I think this is a good experience.

References

I found this walk cycle reference on the internet and I thought that this pretty much sums up the key poses that were needed in the walk cycle animation. I referred to this image all the time when I was animating my character.