Thursday 20 November 2008

walking is harder then it sounds...

Learning to animate walking has to be one of the key things to do..and it may be that every walk is different and everyone has a different style of walking due to their build, gender, mood, but to get any walk looking right you have to get the basic concepts right. In realising this I hope to develop my walk cycles to get them looking right so that I can then go on to playing around with them and putting different emotions and characters into the walk.



After trying a few walks in 2D and a few in 3D there are things I need to change and work on to get it looking correct and natural. After trying a few times in 3D and getting used to the controls and the way that the character can move I eventually got a roughly half decent looking walk..(even playing around with movement of the shoulders, head, and hair) but again there are parts that i could smooth out and make more natral. At the moment she almost looks like she is creeping forwards at the start and although the movement is exaggerated, I think parts need a more natural movement rather then the slightly mechanical one it has now. To achieve this I think I just need to create the walk over and over until I'm familiar with it and can create the type of walk I want. I found it easier to make the 2D walk look more natural, however there are still areas i need to work on in this one.



I'm happy with the way the legs move in general, however in the lowest phase (after the contact)I find I tend to make the front leg further forwards which wouldn't happen. I think I do it because I assume the character is moving forwards when actually the foot is planted on the floor with the body weight transferred onto it, so I need to make sure I correct this. Saying that, I also need to exaggerate the weight movement from each leg by moving the body mass over the correct foot. Looking at the arms I am quite happy with the movement, however there is one jolt which doesn't quite look right. So back to the drawing board tomorrow to practice and iron out the kinks... Life drawing this week helped by seeing the human figure walking and also looking at different types of walk and movement. Looking at contact positions as well helped me to get ideas for 2D animation and perhaps where I am going wrong with the poses.

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