(Term 1: Week 3)

This week we were assigned to make a polished full-body walking animation as a continuation from the previous week half body animation. The full-body animation can be quite tough since there are more body parts that we need to take care off to such as the head, body and arm movements.

The aim is to understand and produce a normal walking animation without any characteristic or stylised movements. So it will have the same four basic walking poses for contact, down (low), passing position and up (high).

This time we can choose any rigged character model from the Luke’s resources share. After checking almost all the characters, I ended up with this guy…

But then I quickly changed to this slim guy called ‘thepp’ which I think has a good rig that I can control.

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References

Here are some of the references that I used.

Animation Process – Blocking

The process is almost similar to the previous week except with the additional poses for the upper body parts. This time also we can proceed to polish the animation with the splining stage.

For the constraint task, I imported an apple model and attached it to the character’s right hand. I tried several methods that Luke showed in his demo such as point and aim, but for the apple I used the simple ‘parent’ method since it’s not moving and just following the hand movement. I also made a simple custom belt model and ‘parent’ it to the character pelvis controller.

I started with blocking all the key poses of the character using the ‘step tangents’. The character begins walking with his right foot at the front and the hands moving in the opposite direction of the foots. I used the same timing as before with 24 frames for each complete cycle.

I set the first ‘contact’ pose at frame 0, ‘down’ pose at frame 3, ‘passing position’ pose at frame 6, ‘up’ pose at frame 9 and then back to ‘contact’ pose at frame 12. I then continued the motion for frame 15, 18, 21 and 24 by manually mirroring the opposite pose.

I used the same method as before to refer the opposite poses for the second half of the walk cycle using the ‘translate’ and ‘rotate’ number in channel box and also by back-and-forth comparing between the key poses, . I don’t want to copy the exact number so I can still make all the opposite poses in the walk cycle look identical but organic at the same time. I managed to complete 5 cycles or 10 steps that ended at frame 120.

The hip and upper body will always twisting and moving to the left and right trying to balance its weight and center of gravity according to the legs position.

Animation Process – Splining

After I satisfied with all the key poses, I converted all the keyframes in the Graph Editor to ‘Auto tangents’. Right after the changes, the character is now moving smoothly. But.. too smooth until it looks unnatural. The timing is quite off since the software will automatically create the curve without knowing where it should slow in and out properly.

I begin tweaking the animation curves by adjusting the main body part first, which is the hip. The final curves are smooth when the character lift its body at the highest position (‘up’ pose) and sharp ‘V’ shapes when the character at the lowest position (‘down’ pose). I converted all the lowest keys using the ‘Break tangents’ to have total control of the shapes. The method is also applied for both foots especially for the ‘V’ shape when the foots are stepping or making contact with the ground.

All the adjusted curves are to create proper slow in and out and give the illusion of gravity and weight to the body parts.

Animation Process – Polishing

I did some overlapping adjustment by offsetting the timing especially for the head, arms and hands. The arms and hands motion are where I spend most time adjusting. They would move a bit slower than their parent or upper part. So in this process most of the keyframes were offset by 1 or 2 frames behind.

Before I wrap it up, I made small adjustments to make the animation a bit more interesting; the character give some reaction to the viewer by turning his head and eyes to the camera.

Final Animation