For my third walk cycle I decided to time something to music like how Tabasi how done in his loops:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en
This was my last walk and was due in two weeks so I didn’t plan this one quite as much as the others since I needed to hit the ground running with this. I came up with the idea of a groovy robot with big rubbery arms and sketched it out in my notebook. I decided to go with the taller bottom design as it would allow me incorporate more hip movements.
The next problem was finding a beat I could animate too. I wasn’t too sure where to begin since looking at the stuff Tabasi had done, he seemed to have gotten a friend to create specific music to use since he sells them as NFTs. I decided to start searching through royalty free jingles on YouTube until I found this:
It was funky and had a clear beat I thought I could animate to. I took the audio into Premiere Pro and cut it down further to around a 8 sec clip.
From there I took it into Harmony and tried to match the contact poses of the walk to the beat. I decided to use just 2 seconds of the clip I made.
Since I wanted to explore displacing the weight via the hips and shoulders, I had a look back through William’s Surivival Kit and found this section:
This gave me a really good guide for how handle the weight during the walk.
I had to time the walk out on threes in order to match the beat of the music which gave it something of a rather clunky movement. I don’t really like walks being done on threes, personally I feel it’s too slow and unatural but it allowed me more space to work with the arms. The walk at this stage I felt was very dull. I decided not to do the speaker on the chest, since it wouldn’t really add much and chose to spin the whole up body not just the hat.
Before I started a did a quick sketch of the torso spin in my notebook to help me figure the movement out. Working on threes actually helped me here since I had more timing to play around with for the torso. I started planning how many poses it would take to spin the torso and how many frames I had before the robot returned to his next down pose.
Rather than start spinning the whole body at once I broke it down into sections and started with the torso first, since it would set the speed for the head and arms. This gave me the idea to then break the body apart as he walks, letting the torso hang in the air as it spins.
I liked the spin, I felt it helped give the walk that extra flair it was missing. I also used some of the foreshortening techniques I had learned from my first biped walk to help polish the end of the arm spin. I choose to exaggerated the up and down pose to help set the spin up more and give it that extra punch on the down.
You’ll struggle to see this in the gif but my first pass on seperating the head and body out involved having the head and torso seperate twice before I decided it didn’t look as good and actual subtracted from the second seperation, so stuck with just one.
Below is my final version of the walk repeated in video for ease.
In reflection there were elements of this walk I was happy with. I liked the spin, I thought it was timed nicely to the beat of the music and liked the weight displacement in the shoulders and hips, although I probably could have pushed it a little further in some parts. There was also a certain something in the way the character was drawn that looked increasingly off to me. I wasn’t sure if it was the repeating internal lines on the arms and legs that was causing strange tangents or busy-ness when they overlapped on the passing poses, or if it was the thickness of my lines.
Looking at it now I think it’s the arms become lost in the staging of the passing pose, so I’m left with an unclear silhouette. Adding some colour to help differentiate between arms and legs might have worked. If I was to do it again I think I would stage the character a bit better to allow me to seperate the body further and go higher on the up poses and clean up the silhouette.