Project 2 - Standard Walk Cycle

Front angle

Left angle

Right angle

In this assignment, i have created this man walking forward. I followed the slides provided by Mr Douglas closely and used the powerpoint slides as a guide to create this animation. I must say that the slides were very useful and of good help.

This was provided in one of the slides given. I made use of this to adjust the character's pelvis/hip movement as the character moves (Translate Y). This was a very useful guide for me when i was trying to coordinate the leg movements with the key frames.

This was provided in one of the slides given too. I find that this was extremely helpful when it comes to animating the whole 36 frames where i had to coordinate both legs and hands movements. 

I made use of the guide above (also provided in powerpoint slides by Mr Douglas) to set the hands and legs positions at the respective number of frames. This has helped me save up on time while creating the animation. 

I feel that this walk cycle was relatively tedious to do. I spent a lot of time making my character walk smoothly. I started off by making my character take a step forward. I did so by making my character's left leg move forward first. After which, i made the character's left leg move forward. While doing so, I have learnt that it is highly important to divide the keyframes equally (i have used 36 frames per cycle in this walk cycle). We also have to animate the character to make it walk/move smoothly by making sure that at frames 0, 18 and 36, the legs, heels, hands and hip positions are set to the same units so that my character looks like it is walking smoothly (at frame 18, i had to set the respective units at frame 0 to my character's opposite legs and hands. However, at frame 0 and 36, my character's legs and hands will have the same input units because these are the frames where my character starts and stops respectively. This is an advantage for me because at the end of doing this animation, i looped the video.). For the character's arms to move smoothly as well as to show that the character is walking at ease, i made sure that when the left leg is taking a step forward, the character's right arm will swing forward. When the character's right leg is taking a step forward, his left arm will swing forward. This simply allows the character to look naturally while talking a walk. In, i have adjusted the character's fingers as well. As we all can see, my character will slightly open and close his hands as he walks. This was done so by selecting the respective fingers and adjusting the various units to help make my character look natural. At this stage of completion, I still felt that my character was a little stiff. I then added on a head movement where my character's head slightly bobs up and down as he walks to show that he is comfortable walking and that he is not having a neck-ache. I have also shifted this check forwards a little as he walks to show that his body is being brought forward as he is walking. Also, I have looped my animation and repeated the frames to the 180th frame to ensure that my video lasts for 5 seconds. This was a very interesting project to work on, and i definitely enjoyed the whole process because I have learnt to create a walk cycle without much help from my peers and lecturer, and this has certainly given me a sense of achievement. Although i have spent a lot of time with this part of project 2, I am very pleased and satisfied with my animation and i am even more motivated to move on to the second part of project 2. :)