I think it was because this is my first time of experiencing of doing a walk cycles, I did get really confused of how each of the step was happening and not too sure the purpose of each staps. During the progress of doing the walk cycle wasn’t too challenging because I followed the tutorial steps. The difficult part was to understand the reason of why many keyframes, and drawings was there for and how would the placement of the body affect the nature and smoothness of the walk to make it look dramatic at the same realistic. Also understanding the pull and drag were sometimes the arm is moving because it’s dragged by the shoulder and along it pulls the wrist. When the pull and drag tend to happen the one that’s following the drag tend always be a move slower the part which is doing the drag.
Reference image:
After completing the walk and sneak cycle, I improved a better understanding of how to perform different cycles. I wanted to try have an attempt on doing the run cycle myself which I begin it looking at the reference image that was provided. I spaced out the keyframes in twos, following from contact pose, down, passing one, two and up then back to contact pose.
Rachel’s first set of feedback on Sync Sketch was that the head was rotated too low, facing the ground; I needed to lift it up more, and the front foot was going through the ground. The same thing happened to the right-side foot in frame 6, as well as the left-side feet in frames 12, and 16. To fix this, I placed some more keyframes in between. In frame 4, I required more overlapping movement between the back and the chest. Frame 9, the back should be straighter and raised to its maximum height. Frames 12 and 16, needing the elbow to pull upwards to overlapped further. Finally, the overall feedback of this first draft was that the back and chest were still stiff, so I experimented with the rotation to make it move smoother and more natural. She also stated that the arm needed better fluidity, so I increase the rotations amount of elbow and wrist to evoke pull and drag overlapping movements.
Sync Sketch Link that Rachel used to give feedback: Rain Rig – Run Cycle Sideview -> Run Cycle Side
After I fixed those mistakes, I experimented with rotations and keyframes. Rachel looked at my run cycle in the Blender file. She noticed an obvious problem, which was that the upper body, neck, and head were moving jerkily and dramatically. We spent some time trying to figure out what was causing the jerkiness, which was that I was having too many similar rotations in spine and hip control, and the same thing happened with the head and neck. To address this, Rachel suggested that I use the graph editor to smooth out X-axis rotation curves instead of massive mountain curves, as well as that I could scale the curves to reduce the extreme performance of the nodding.
At the end of the run cycle, I discovered a mistake: the rain rig’s head had shifted to the side, and her neck was stretched longer while its location coordinate was 0cm. I attempted to solve it by moving the neck back to the centre of the body, meaning that the location coordinate had moved, but I wasn’t sure if this was the correct method to do it, so I asked Rachel for advice. She believed that there should be no movement in the location other than rotation, so she looked through my Blender file and discovered that I was moving the head and neck locations. To solve this, I’ll must clear both head and neck’s location coordinate.
Final
Had an attempt on the 2D run cycle following Richard William’s reference:
First draft:
Speed version:
Clean up version: