Basic Walk
Moving on the first animation I wanted to attempt was a walk cycle. To begin I animated in maya, and to figure out how I would animate the walk cycle I decided to look at the walk cycle breakdown in the Richard Williams Animators Survival Kit. I took this break down and imported it into Maya as an image plane. This allowed me to key each frame matching the artwork, image below.
Once done with that I decided to look into how I would pace each part of the animation, I decided to do this by looking at the average amount of steps taken in a second and dividing that by how many key poses I had for the cycle, it ended up being two steps per second with eight poses, since the playback rate was 24fps I just divided that by 8 and got three frames per pose. From here I was able to space out the animation which there was an odd slew of issues with, spacing frames out at least in my scene caused animation issues, such as the rig breaking, this is because intially I did not key the entire rig at once. So I redid the animation with this in mind and was able to get a very basic animation, below.
My issue from here was I was aiming for a fundamentally basic walk cycle, there really wasn’t much character or fluidity to the walk cycle even when I would go into the graph editor and smooth out tangents to help poses transitions one into another better. However I wanted to practice my pipeline and I felt this helped me get a better idea of how I would approach future animations. The final touches I added despite this was some secondary action to make the walk slightly less stiff including a head bob on the down poses and a slight tilt up on the walks passing pose, as well as the shoulders swaying back and forth.
Chimp Walk
After that I decided I wanted to have another go at a walk cycle in Maya and try something more challenging, so after looking through the video below:
https://youtu.be/HEoUhlesN9E?t=18
I decided that the animation I wanted to try would be the Chimp walk, and so I went forward with this. To prepare I decided to convert the clip into an mp4, then cut it down to the cycle I wanted, export it as an image sequence and import the clip into Maya as an image plane that I would use as reference. The challenge from there would be lining up the reference with the model, I did this by making the plane the character would walk on a similar size to the reference relative to the rig of course. Then I keyed in the poses I felt were most important in the clip, I did this while also spacing each frame relative to the reference.
This helped however if I was to close and reopen the project the camera would shift slightly slowing the overall workflow, it wasn’t a major issue however. This method of mimicing footage I also found somewhat frustrating, mainly because of the anitomical differences between actual people and the rig. However I understand I am to interpret the poses and not copy them, this was apparent when I had keyed in two steps realising after trying to copy and paste the cycle the two steps were different breaking the animation, this is is again a result of me relying on reference too much. I fixed this this by just copying and pasting the first frame to the end. I kept this in mind however moving forward. Below is the final animation:
When animating this I realised when a chimp would walk they would oscilate back and forth while also moving up and down giving a stumbling look to their walk which makes sense as its not entirely natural to them, however on a human model I realise it looks odd and caveman like, friends I had look over the animation also pointed this out, this may not be intentional but I am happy with the result breaking away from basic walk cycles.
