Wednesday 14 October 2009

The walks are back...

For the character animation project we have starting doing walks again..just getting back into the basics before trying to animate them in a more characterised way. I couldn't decide what medium to do it in and thought it was probably best to have a go at both to make sure I could still remember how to do it! I had a couple of attempts in 2D...



Above is the first attempt which I think went ok, there are just a few things such as the head changing shape quite a bit, not squashing and stretching correctly and the arms also look as if they get longer in the inbetween phase when they are to the side of the body. The shoulder movement looks ok but I could have probably put a bit more into the hips. Its also moving quite quickly and is more of a strut then a natural walk. so, attempt 2...



I definately think the second one is an improvement. The walk is more natural, not too exaggerated, the arm swing works better and flows in a smoother way and I think the body movement overall jsut has a better appearance. The head now stays the same size, however it may need a bit of squash and stretch as something about it still doesn't look quite right. I attempted creating a walk in 3D using a new rig. I thought it was working quite well, and I got the legs moving well and the arm swing going smoothly with the body. I think I then tweeked and moved around the rest of the body a bit too much and got to the point that when I played the walk it was a bit jutery and not very natural. The figure's head seems to move around quite a lot which I wasn't too aware of when animating it. The main problem with the walk however is the speed. I managed to play it back in Maya twice the speed and it works quite well as some of the juddery movements aren't as obvious and look smoother. However when creating a playblast the speed goes down and the walk doesn't look good...so this definately needs to be changed...another few attempts at this one maybe...

No comments: