Blocking the Walk Cycle
This week I decided to work on my walk cycle as I believe this will be the easiest of the three animations, and so this would be the best one to start with to allow me to practice with the Azri rig. Part of the assignment involves considering the animation method that you want to use. I have decided to use the blocking method as I like blocking out all the key poses first before going back for in-betweens, as this method gives me a rough idea of what the animation will look like.
Before I started to work on my animation, I added in a cube to create a floor for the character to walk on. This will allow me to get the feet positions accurate, so that they don’t dip below the ground throughout the animation.
I then started to block out my animation. To do this, I imported my references and started to pose my character. I want to make the character appear confident in this walk cycle, so I’m going to exaggerate all of her movements. Since this is only the blocking stage, I only focused on the movements of the character. I didn’t work on her clothing or her hair.
When working on the poses, I started working on the feet and gradually made my way up to the arms. Since I wanted my character to appear confident, I wanted to exaggerate the movements in her arms, waist and legs. The steps were easy enough to do, due to my prior experience creating walk cycles. For previous walk cycles I had used the monty rig which doesn’t have arms, so I initially struggled to get the arm movements right. While working on the arms I realised that the movements appeared to be far too stiff for the confident look that I was going for. To fix this, I used the should controls to help exaggerate the movement of the arms even more. This resulted in the arms having a really nice swing, which really makes a difference and helps make the character look more confident. Once I had finished all the key poses, I used the dope sheet to fix the timings of the animation and I got the following playblast:
Overall I believe that this is a good start to the animation, however there are a few changes that I will need to make. The movement in her hips isn’t quite right and so I will need to go back and fix this. After showing this playblast to my peers they gave me some feedback and suggested that I should try to exaggerate her steps even more, so I will try to work on that in my next version as well.