Walk Cycle Animation

 Walk Cycle

Narrative

Walk Cycle is a very basic and effective way to learn and apply principles of Animation. Many different types of walk cycles define the personality of a character through emotions. I decided to go with the SWAT walk cycle with the gun in both hands pointing towards the enemy. 

The basic idea behind choosing the particular walk cycle is to play with the constraints.

Planning

With the help of Canvas Animation lectures, It was very easy and time-saving to find an exact reference of the particular walk cycle.  

I chose Judy Hops from the movie Zootopia because of her incredibly fluid rig and intricate controls like her tail and ears, which are crucial for applying rules like overlapping and follow-through during the walk cycle.

To simplify the whole workflow, I decided to draw a mind map.

  Reference Collection

I collected specific references that showcase the blocking poses of the relaxed walk. From this, it helped me to understand the positioning of the Legs, hips, and the head in specific poses. 

For instance, the walk cycle consists of five major poses

1. First contact pose

2. First passing pose

3. Second contact pose

4. Second passing pose

5. Third contact

For the record, I was not sure if there would be any major hand moment in the walk cycle as my character is holding a gun while walking. To make sure, I filmed myself walking with the object in my hand, and I came to know that there were slight shoulder moments.

Moreover, with the help of syncsketch, I marked the noticeable moments and crucial poses of the character which helped me to understand the key poses and the frame rate of the cycle.

 

Before starting the project, from Canvas's “Animation Lectures,” I went thoroughly through several presentations like 12 Principles of Animation, Setting Scene, and many more. That helped me to understand basic rules so that it would not create any confusion at a later stage.

Setting up the project

To start with, I set the project so that we get all the directories as needed and all the source files will be well organized. 

Secondly, I rendered out the image sequence of the reference in Nuke and imported it in Maya on the image plane.

Third, I studied and tested the rig so that I would be aware of the specific controllers which will make the process easier. Sometimes, the number of controls in a character can be too many, and it becomes quite difficult to select some without selecting others and it slows down the work. The facial rig is well-advanced. It consists deformable controllers.

 

Lastly, I referenced the Judy hops rig file in Maya.

Before starting to block the key poses, I set the rifle on the character’s hand in a shooting position and parented it with the hand controller. So that whenever he moves while walking, the gun will move along with the character.

Blocking out main poses

I divided the cycle into multiple stages as I wanted to concentrate at one stage at a time instead of the whole main body.

• Legs, foot, toe, knee

• COG, Torso, back

• Hand, Shoulders

• Head, eyes, eyelids

• Ears

The walk cycle keeps oscillating between these five vital poses.

I asked Professor Richard for feedback after completing the fundamental poses, and it was then that I saw there were many incorrect and missing details. 

For instance, instead of creating a reference I dragged and dropped the character rig in the Maya file. From this, I learned creating a reference for the file helps to utilize the overall size resulting in an improvement in viewport performance and glitches.


Wrong Placement of the Leg

Furthermore, It's not only about legs, there are many slight moments of hand, core, and back. So it's always a good idea to alter the maximum amount of controllers which makes the animation appealing.

 

I discovered that even when animating simple poses, there are numerous considerations to make. I observed that the leg was slightly moving in the X-axis throughout the passing pose. I therefore put up a ground plane with lots of sub-divisions to assess the problem. Secondly, I accidentally put keys on the toes, which knocked them into the ground plane. Third, While passing the leg was easing in and easing out where it should be at constant speed. 

With the help of the graph editor, It was easy for me to tweak the keys on a particular axis for the toes and legs.

To ensure that the leg moves at a constant speed, set the motion of the leg to be linear.

Conversely, ease in and ease out were used in the second example since the leg is in it and the motion created when it rests on the floor is similar to a ball falling from the air. 

Sometimes in these cases, I learned that deleting the keys and redoing the posing is more convenient than improving the previous animation.

following the completion of the leg section blocking and the application of the feedback.

I began focusing on other controllers. 

The pelvis rotates somewhat in all directions, front, and rear, when walking. I also had to make sure the character wasn't losing his equilibrium when walking while setting keys. While walking, shifting the weight is essential.

Animating ears was an interesting part of this project. Before starting animating I studied the motion of ears from the Zootopia movie as I was confused if the movement of ears is delicate or in a massive way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73mZI_n2elk

While walking, the rotation of the ears depends on the moment of the head which is front and back. So with the help of the graph editor, I was able to work on the specific axis easily and with the help of Animbot tools like best guess which helps to settle the graph automatically. Moreover, while the character is looking right, the moment of ears are slightly towards the opposite side including follow-through and overlapping principles.

I used a mirror to animate the ears and later after getting done with them, I tweaked them slightly as the similar motion didn't look appealing.

Moreover, as the hand was in IK the gun was stiff and there was no movement on the hands. So I manually set keys on the hand according to the moment of the body.

After sharing files in one of the support sessions, I received feedback that the gun movement was not quite up to the mark, and as I parented the gun with the hand it was creating issues in hand movements.

After looking thoroughly in the COG controller setting we found out there is a parent option in which it parents the whole limbs of the character. With the help of the assets attribute space switcher, It was easy for me to unparent it on each set of keys and the issue was solved. Also, to solve the parenting issue I created the controller for the gun manually and constrained parent it with both hands.

Self Critique

I started the project in a well-planned manner. However, while finalizing the animation I tried to polish it more but it backfired. At some point, I felt like I was ruining the animation by tweaking keys in the graph editor.

I think I should have spent more time testing the rig with basic animations to understand the workings of controllers thoroughly.

Still, lot of study and observation were required as I was not able to observe the slight movements in Animation( Eye for detail)

To obtain that plugin, I believe I should practice using Animbot more.