Over the Summer I wanted to get some more experience of 3D animation, and for this I wanted to look into walk cycles (something I also looked into on the 2D side as well: https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/b00839206-bdes-animation/2023/09/13/2d-animation-walk-cycles-practice/)
The first thing I did was find a tutorial to give me a basics on how to approach on how to create a walk, and I found this helpful in not only following along, but on how to break up movement that has a lot of moving parts to it. Then I went and downloaded some rigs from online that included the foot roll (BOTW Zelda Rig by Christoph Schoch, and Rain and Snow Rigs from Blender).
First day of working on some 3D animation I simply followed along with the videos approach and translated that onto my own rig. It looks pretty stiff to me, lacking personality, but it let me get to familiarise myself with working on a rig and breaking down the movements and try to understand bodily movements and anatomy. I also finished this day with playing around with the rig and created an idle animation, both of these practices could be refined with some reference videos.
For the next day I went and grabbed a video for reference seen below:
I used the same approach as the tutorial video, but tried to make the elements more animated for more personality, but one thing these both lack to me is the idea of weight, the impact of the supporting leg taking the weight of the body and then the transfer on each step.
Looking back at this now, I think this movement could have been adjusted, the balance of weight seems unnatural to me here.
I decided I wanted to translate this walk cycle into a quick scene, and I did this by just animating a forward translation on the master CTRL. I then found that even when adjusting the graphs, I was going to have to find a way to stop this sliding effect happening.
I followed this video below to try and fix my issue, but admittedly I didn’t spend enough time on this particular attempt so they do still have that sliding effect.
I had this silly little idea I wanted to make now that I had access to a Zelda rig, I tried to lipsync some audio with. Then I went and made up a little scene inspired by BOTW environments, including quickly modelling and texturing other components like the sign and the Korok. the background foliage was made using PNGs as well as using a hair emitter to create grass strands.
One last thing I wanted to try improve on was this idea of weight, so I followed this reference and tried to use some constraints to create this box lifting animation. I definitely should have put more work into this, but I was a bit impatient and decided to leave it as is before I got too frustrated. I was able to grasp the idea of how to create weight a bit more and got more practice on animating rigs.
The last thing I created was following a little Ghibli Style Food tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoQuqJ7UZIE_iD5EIIvkZn_c9t-niDCJM). I think exploring the uses of the nodes more will help me greatly with using Blender to create assets and scenes etc. for future project, so this let me build on what I learnt in Semester 1.