week 2- constructing a walk

Why i abandon the other walk

I am going to walk through my process of the basic walk as I got a good way into it before leaving it in favor of the 2D one.
 To start the 3D walk I made the arms switch to FK to help the posing process and then created the first contact pose by planting the feet in a good distance between each other as this would be the first contact pose. 

Then going forward after making the down, the first/second pass, the up and then the second contact I reviewed each pose and 
adjusted the ankle pose to sell the pushing off motion as well as starting to add some very early signs of drag within the feet. 
One of the tips within this stage was trying to keep all rotations and values to an even number this would inter keep it even on 
the graph editor when it's came to changing it from Bezier to liner and having equal arcs within it. 

This is more apparent within the hip control is a bit like the ik the hip controller can shift the height of the rig 
in varying ways as well it parallel to the feet to the ground so say if you move the hips down that would trigger the feet i's to bend the
 knees of the model. The other thing I did was to create a loop for the up and down motion in the walk by using the exarate mode to loop 
the graphs curves into a repetitive cycle. Though it was coming on well a was having trouble keeping up with the values and overall wasn’
t happy with how it was going so, I c=may come and finish this later date but, I think it might be for the best if I really taker in the 
2D workflow so I could translate it to this.  

 

Then came the limbs where I took the advice from the 2D walk presentation and my project last year and put each individual lime or moving 
element on to its own layer so I could more easily edited them. I had a tough time with the volume control of the feet and how they came 
down onto the ground. I fixed this by adding an in-between when the toes where about to hit the ground and for the volume it was as simple 
as just upping the opacity of the onion skin and tracing the pervious so not much as I was thinking it was going to be.  

Then after the arms were added it was time to break them, this is a form of adding drag to the limbs which intern helps the arc of the
 arm flow more smoothly overall. This also shows us which limb is leading the way for example in this case it is the wrists to it makes 
sense they will me more ahead of the walk which, adds some much need weight to the walk. 

 

Then it was the time for the extra videos we did not get to do in class that day, such as secondary action where I wanted to add the ears 
and scarf my character had. To do the ears it was a bit complicated because I knew for that kind of ears, they are not that floppy's, 
creating good drag on them was hard. Though I do think that they could be improved I on the transition between the last frame and the first 
frame just to have the illusion that it coming back with the same force as it goes forward. Though I am happy with the result it's something 
to came back to. For the scarf I implied the chain principle to simulate cloth.  the idea is like the ball where you move a row of ball and 
have them bounce in a descending order of each other to create this wave effect. 

Then came the rotation of the body where I added the Nosie where I adjusted the volume of the noise to show how 
the nose moves around the head is plus by adding a blank frame for when the head turns to give the illusion of it being out of sight. 

Afterwards it was just a case of having it reviewed by the tutors by the tutors and doing the line art to clean the piece up and to 
make it readable as a whole.

Now the next step would be to implement the changes suggested by the tutor such as adding a little more movement to the end of the scarf. 
Then for the some of the time there spacing was a bit off but that's not too hard to fix but the biggest one would be how ears match up with
 the starting frame and the last it just snaps back a bit too much and those 2 frames need to flow into each other better. overall, 
the feedback is mostly positive it just a matter of adding it in now.

I made the recommended changes that were mentioned earlier this week to moderate success. 
The hands are moving as there supposed to be now which is great and everything looks as clean as it can be. 
The changes I have struggled with were the scarf and the ears, the advice for the ears were to have the last frame match the starting frame 
which would avoid the snap which was happing each time the cycle started. To fix this I adjusted the last frame to have a tiny bit of drag but
 not too much that its horizontal but enough that when it transitions back to frame one it looks like its starting over more naturally. 
The big problem was the scarf the problem was that the last node in the chain was too stationary but each time I changed it went into a fit of
 snapping back and forth or did not line up right with the last frame. The fix I implemented was to remove the last node from the chain and 
have much shorter movements which did help me because the chain theory is still new to me and I havening gotten the hang 
of it just yet. 
Though it was an improvement now it is lost that wave it originally had but I do think that it is much more manageable now to see where I
 was going wrong. I believe the fix would be to add just a bit more overlap within the two nodes at the back and have them offset to really
 sell this idea.