Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Walk Revised

After some nice criticism from Ian i made some changes to my walk. Granted it has taken me a while but being on holidays there are distractions.
Again download and continuous play that bitch!

Clicky click

5 comments:

Ian said...

looking better man.

It would be interesting to see from the front, is there any side to side movement (with the weight moving over towards the foot on the ground on the Passing position), and is there any twist in the body and hips, a line of action when looking from the front?

Have a close look at the knees, they need to be smoothly bending and straightening out with each stride. Usually once I have the posing and body movement right, I end up keying the feet on almost every frame to achieve this. With the leg stretching out between the anckle and hips, and both of those things moving indipendantly it would take a huge fluke to get a smooth action in the leg. I just end up doing it the hard way (which turns out to be the easy way). :P

While your working on that I would try to get a nice roll on the foot as it comes onto the ground.

Ian said...

hmmm expanding on Keying the feet...

When the foot moves under the body on the ground obviously I don't key every frame, liniar inbetweens are the go there so the foot moves at a constant speed. Its as the foot lifts up from the ground, moves through the air and then rolls down on to the ground that I end up getting key happy :)

Danielli said...

thanks for that scarily large piece of advice ian. im onto it again. i acctually did some tweaking after i uploaded that last one, just drag on the feet on the passing poses so he didnt look like he was stomping his feet down so much.
from the front he looks a bit boring, no side to side motion as yet but that is on my list of things to do.
and what is with you and your hat???

Ian said...

You call that long?!?!?!?

Do you know who your talking to? :P

Frank said...

Hi Dan and Ian

The Gobelins 3D animators, coming from a 2D traditional training base, key the feet on twos all the way through the cycle for control of the ball and toe roll and the arcs for the knees and heel.

Kyle Balda (Pixar etc) animates a lot using the graph editor, so he uses the same system as Ian with linear tangents applied to the feet on the ground. And he adjusts the curves for the feet travelling through the air using the splines to get acceleration through the passing position.

If you open up the graph editor on a Gobelins walk it looks exactly the same for feet translations (along the ground) as a Balda walk.

The Balda method is a bit more efficient for time for an animator with a few walk cycles under their belt.

The Gobelins method is better for early understanding, as it breaks down the walk visually, rather than in curves in the GE.

Both of them work. All the teachers agreed that it is the final result that is important.

Listening to Kyle Balda explaining a walk using the graph editor was like sitting through a review of what Ian taught us and what I will be teaching the second years as we build those showreels this semester.

An important aspect of the Balda/Pixar/Lacey method was to start the walk animation with ruff animation on the contact and passing positions, then leave the feet alone and go into the root control of the character (at the pelvis). Apply the various rotations and translations for your XYZ axes to the pelvis and then go back to the feet and knees.

As you can tell, I'm looking forward to teach this stuff but have to get over this jet lag first that has me walking around feeling like I'm walking on an escalator.

Ian's advice is spot on and Dan it's great to see you working at a walk during the break from classes.

You'll be building another walk cycle when I get to start teaching you again on Thursdays.