As I had done my initial run cycle with my character Ali, I wanted to use my small robot character Gigabyte as the example of a walk cycle. I began trying to find some examples of robot walks as reference:
I tried to take some elements from all of these, however none of them really gave me exactly what I was looking for – I found it very difficult to find a reference that was a good balance between robotic and smooth in movement. I wanted this character to come across as quite care free and goofy, rather than totally robotic. This was my first pass:
After feedback from Alec, I know that this character walk needs smoothed out, the frame where his hands come to their peak in the arc where the head is facing away from the camera is a little dramatic, and could do with an extra frame to smooth the transition of the arm movement. I also need to take a little care with Gigabyte’s head size through this. Overall, I’m really pleased with the movement and this feels like a good place to start – I really feel as though I’ve captured the character’s happy-go-lucky and goofy personality so far!
I added more frames where the movement had originally been a little janky, and I cleaned up the lines of Gigabyte:
Again, I am quite happy with how this is progressing. I think I still need to add some frames, some parts of his movement still need a bit of smoothing out. I am waiting for some feedback from Alec, and then I will work on this more.
I received good feedback from both Alec and Niall; Alec suggested that at the apex of his walk, Gigabyte’s hands flick up too harshly and the movement is quite jarring. Niall also pointed out that the movement of the hips on the right hand side were quite clunky, and it was not suggesting the same movement as the hip movement does on the left hand side. He also mentioned that the little indents on the side of his torso, the PS1 body, were inconsistent throughout the walk and that the face would probably lean more towards the left than the right in the movement from the right to the left. Finally, the straps did not move the same on the down pose to the right as they did on the down pose to the left. I drew some red lines in this rendition to reflect the changes I should make:
This is the walk with the changes:
I’m really happy with how this boy turned out. there are some more changes I feel I could make, such as in the arc of the knee and the consistency of the knee size.
I went through the animation to make sure that all of the elbow, knee, shoulder and ankle joints were consistent in shape and size. I also made sure that each of the joints had a consistent arc.
I have some 3D animation tests for a walk cycle from my classes at Berkeley College, which helped as some reference for creating Gigabyte’s walk cycle:
I’m really happy with how my walk cycled turned out, I wanted to put a lot of thought into the personality of Gigabyte – I wanted his little walk to feel fun, playful, a little thoughtless and carefree.
