Sergio Walk Cycle WIP

Started off with a couple quick thumbnails to illustrate the basic mood I wanted to capture in the posing. You can see how the idea was really rough with the thumbnail at the far left, and how I took time to tighten up the pose with the subsequent thumbnails. Also, it's a good idea to draw the pose from profile so that the angle of the character's body is being taken into account.

With my idea fleshed out in thumbnail form I start right in with the blocking. I approach my animation in a very systematic way, first blocking in the Keys, then moving on to Extremes, then Breakdowns. I keep my Tangents set to "Clamped" and "Stepped" while I'm blocking so that I don't get distracted by any fluid movement. All of the attention should be on the poses and their relationship to one another. Once I'm satisfied with my blocking, I change the Tangent settings and my curves in the Graph Editor to "Linear" (I've always gone straight to Spline in the past, but I'm trying something new this time).

So now everything is Linear, with offsets added only to the hands and head (The overlap of the head is bugging me. I need to work on that).

The feet always require the most attention in a walk cycle. The part of the cycle that I think is the most crucial to get right is the push-off from the toe when the foot is extended at the back of the stride. I try to get this working first before touching anything else.

I'll continue working on this cycle because I really like how it's looking so far and I'll update the Work In Progress as I go. I hope that somewhere, somebody is reading this and finding it useful.

~Chris

How my brain works for animation

I'm working on a canine walk cycle right now and a quadruped is something that I haven't animated much of for a while now. There was a dog character in each of the last two shows that I worked on but the shots that I got with the little fuzzballs were few and far between.

I've always been really attracted to quadruped locomotion because it just looks so cool. The perfect balance of movement in the front and hind quarters is so smooth and elegant. More so with some animals, less so with others.

Anyway, I cracked open my Muybridge books to study the phases of the walk and I noticed that if you can understand where the strides come into play and how the energy radiates down the spine from the hips to the head, it gets you a long way towards animating a successful walk. I've seen people animate these things in a really automated, computationally heavy way but that really doesn't work for me. I like to figure out what's happening on each extreme and really push and explore the possibilities in the pose before I start getting into the Graph Editor because it's a completely different part of the brain that goes into that initial building of the performance.

The Graph Editor, awesome though it may be, requires a large amount of resources from your Left Brain and if my Left Brain is working hard my Right Brain tends to not add much to the situation. That's why I have to work in a very systematic way. First this, then this. Okay, now that this is done, move on to this, and so on.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now. Check out the playblast of my blocking for the canine walk and draw your own conclusions.



I'll just finish by saying that this is the work flow that I follow about 99.9% of the time:

Heavy, in-depth blocking of Keys, Extremes, Breakdowns, and sometimes more detailed bits depending on the scenario. Then I switch gears to work in the Graph Editor, which is a pretty painless process due to the extensive blocking. Then I tackle the face with a similar approach and... BAM!... done.

I'll post more videos of this walk cycle as it becomes more complete. It's my project for this week so hopefully you should be able to see it fully animated by Friday or Saturday... schedules permitting.

~Chris