Task:
For week 3, we looked into walk and run cycles and how they are a difficult but useful thing to know how to animate as well as this task building onto the fundamentals that we learned through the bouncing ball exercise and the pose to pose task. This week’s task involved creating a walk cycle with an emphasis on an emotion and run cycle so I continued to use Blender and the origami rig which Mike provided.
Research:
Before starting this task I looked into how to portray an emotion with a walk as well as some real life references of different ‘emotional’ walk cycles that would show a lot of character. I also looked at some diagrams that showed the key poses that would be needed for a walk and run cycle.
Process:
Walk Cycle
For the walk cycle I wanted to create a feeling of ‘I just had a great day’ type of happiness. Using what I learned in the pose to pose task I blocked out my key poses with an emphasis on portraying the happy look I wanted. Once I liked these poses I added the inbetweens following some of the walk cycle diagrams and references I gathered.
Run Cycle
For the run cycle it was basically the same process just with less frames and a key pose where the character’s feet made no contact with the ground as well as limited movement to the head.
Results:
Overall, the walk cycle portrays the happiness I wanted as well as a good level of overlap on the arms compared to the legs but while animating the legs I seem to have created a small jitter at the knees probably from stopping the legs from overextending so that is something I will be careful of in the future. With the run cycle I should have limited the movement of the arms as the animation is a bit busy but I am happy with the posing and timing as it looks as if the character is running and not just doing a fast walk.