This lecture was an introduction to animating vanilla walks.
Vanilla standard plane walk is one of the hardest things to animate, well.. at least for me!!
If I want to animate a personality walk I could make so many critical mistakes in the body, hands, & legs rotations, and
hide behind the fact that this is A personality walk, BUT.. when animating a vanilla walk I need to get all the body mechanics perfect otherwise it will look wrong.
This week at AM we focused on getting the rules and mechanics of a plane walk right, then we can exaggerate and push it farther latter on.
So, here are some important facts about walks which I learned the hard way :
- Walks are a controlled fall, with each step we take we are actually falling forward, then the leg in the back will move fast to the front to catch up and prevents us from falling.
- While walking, the body is moving forward evenly, NO ease in or outs.
- Careful observation on how the wight of the body shifts between the legs will lead to a proper animated walk cycle.
- It takes some energy from the hips to lift the back foot off the ground.
- Knees are always progressing forward.
- For a good walk cycle, you will need at least 150 to 200 frames to loop, so it will not look repetitive.
There are number of key posses that every biped character walk should have, I created a frame to demonstrate the key poses :
Once you merge these frames together (after removing frame 0) it should show up something like this :
Then of curse you'll need to fill up the inbetween and work on there spacing.
Hope that was helpful!! Till next time : )