Walkin' and Rollin'! Getting Familiar with Walk Cycles!

 Hey everyone! 

It's been a busy past few weeks, with many group projects taking up a lot of my time. Thankfully, due to the fact that we have finals coming up soon, 3 out of my 4 group projects are officially taken care of! 

Which means one thing... More time to practice!

Practice makes perfect, as they say. And while I'm far from perfect, I'm proud of the progress I've made on my animation work! 

So, just what have I been up to recently? Well, I'm glad you've asked! 

I've taken some feedback from my teachers into mind and strove to improve my biped walk cycle from a few weeks prior. You know, the one with Mr. Boney in it! 

I still have a lot of work I need to do on it, but I'm happy to be able to spend more time with the rig. I'm also going to keep tweaking this, based on future feedback I get from my teachers.

Without further ado, here's our old pal... Boney!

So, in this iteration of Boney, I attempted to play around with the animation layers, so that everything was separate. Additionally, I tried mirroring the animations on both sides... but I forgot the hotkey for this, so I manually wrote down all of the angles for each of the joints... And "mirrored" them that way. It was painstaking and took a whole sheet of paper, but it worked! And it could have been worse. Way worse!

I'm still not sure about the head movement and hip movement, so I'll probably have to do another iteration in the future. All around, this took at least an entire day of studying walk cycles, medical references, and animation guides. And then, placing each frame. 

I played around with some of the tangents in this one, too. Which helped make the movements seem a little more smooth. A big issue I was having at the very beginning was how rigid the animation looked on the legs, specifically. This was such a problem that I iterated on this scene a lot. There are 31 files I created and 3 separate attempts for this walk cycle. I really wanted this to get done! 

This video is of many of those 31 different edits and iterations, up until the finish line. The first 8 versions of this walk cycle I did not use, as they were really jerky. So, I started over fresh after about 4 hours of work on the first pass. The second pass is the one that has over 20 different iterations. The other several files I tried to create just ended up looking terrible, so I ditched them too.

Why am I rambling on and on about files? Well, because I spent a lot of time working, re-working, and double-re-working my animation. And each iteration is essentially a save state of a certain version of the project, so I was able to work as non-destructively as possible.

I liked working like this, as I was not afraid to "mess anything up" as I experimented with rotation and such. So, I will continue this practice in the future.

Alright. Enough rambling from me! I hope you enjoyed this look into my walk cycle! I'm sure you'll see a few more posts from me this week as I get ready for my finals and continue to implement feedback. 

Thanks for reading!