Introduction
This is third week we do walk animation and in the previous two try I got a lot of experience about how to animate. So, this time I need to avoid the mistake I made last time. For example, keep character’s balance by adjusting the hip. In addition, fortunately I bought a desktop computer which can run Maya without crash, it really makes me convenient to do my animation.
TIPS:
- You will get wrong with the movement of the waist because of the perspective in the reference.
- Making breakdown before animating!
- Make sure the orient of hip firstly.
- Don’t change the position of foot when you finished the foot’ animation
- Don’t make the legs or arms so straight( in review)
PROBLEM:
- I make a mistake in judging the waist movement because of perspective.
- Still confusing the step of doing walk animation
- If following the reference completely without artistic animating.
- I cannot click right button in timeline.
- The movement looked strange in some frames (picture below).
Process
At first, I download a video in YouTube called speed walk and watched it in QuickTime which can see the frame. It is a man who is walking quickly, just like a professional walker.
Overall, we can see that men’s walking speed is a little bit fast, and walking distance is not very long. What is more, he goes through a cycle within about 16 frames.
Firstly, you look at his head, and basically his head doesn’t move at all, even if he does a big movement.
Next, focus on body (spine) and hip movements. Because the character needs to run faster, the short bursts of energy make his movements more dramatic. The warp of his body would be exaggerated, as if it were completely distorted.
Then we look the arms and legs, which are completely different. In contrast to the large movements of the arms, the legs are only slightly raised, not much off the ground. The alternate motion of the foot, however, is curved, with the toes pointing forward. Besides, the legs don’t bend very much, they look straight.
Then I drew some tips in reference in Photoshop, particularly noting down the direction of the chest and hip, which move dramatically in the video. To be honest, I really confused at the beginning because of perspective. I need to walk by myself and make sure the movement of waist.
And now it’s time to choose my character, I believed David is super suitable, for the reason that liking the man in the video, he looks very muscular and his body curves are obvious, which makes him a good match for the video.
Then I began to adjust the legs. This time I chose to determine the Orient for the waist firstly, because adjusting the feet first and then the hips would change the curvature of the legs, which increase the burden of animation.
Then I finished the leg animation.
The next step is to change the orientation of the hip again, which can be seen in the video (which may also be caused by the pants) that the rotation of the man is very dramatic, so I will also show it in the animation.
Now I need to do what Luke taught, choosing the hip controller and going to graph editor to delete the middle points of translate Z( make character move from left to right ), which make the character walked in same speed.
After that it’s time to avoid last mistake that forgot to keep character’s balance. As long as we remember it, I suppose it will be a better view in our animation.
As I said before, what track of character walks is arc, that’s mean I need to adjust the feet. So, I adjusted translate X which I had adjusted in -2 units before of each foot.
After adjusting the hip as well as feet, what I should do next was to rotate the chest, which moved opposite comparing with hip. Actually, I adjusted controllers one by one in order to make him looked natural.
The next step was to adjust the arms and hands, it is easy for me. However, in the video, the man swung his arms so hard that he looked stiff. I don’t know if it’s going to animate artistically to make the characters look less real.
By the way, I met the bug because I cannot click right button in timeline. It was not bad that I can clicked after reloading this software.
But this mistake cannot be solved now, I keyed key and extreme in frame 8 and frame 10. However, as gif shows, in frame 9, his right leg will turn down which was different from frame 10. I didn’t key frame 9!
Whatever I need to key the head, which should be stay in the same position no matter how body moved. At first, I thought it is a simple work, but in fact I keyed lots of frames!
In the end, I just adjust some frames in order that making details active, Remember! Don’t change the position of foot when you finished the foot’ animation, the reason is that it will change all the position!
At last, I edited it in Premiere. In order to watch conveniently, I put all sides in.
Review
首先，根据参考角色的臀部应该往下调整，于是我旋转了臀部。与此同时，我必须也得调整腰部的旋转以保持平衡。
其次，我没有很好地运用参考，可能是我想太多了，角色并没有迈出很大的步伐，所以我需要调整每一个迈出去的步伐。可能对于我这种新手来说，有正面的参考视频会更好。
还有第一个动作的腿部太直了，就像视频参考那样，腿需要弯曲一些，所以我就调整了一下脚部的 位置。【又忘记了！千万不要调整腿部的位置！！！！下降腰部就可以了！！！】
然后就是脚部的位置这里还需要调整，老师认为为了让中心线落在右脚（受力点）右脚的位置应该偏左一些比较好。为了让脚部平滑过渡，为此我还去曲线编辑器调整了曲线的圆滑程度。后来觉得步子迈得还是太大了，干脆一起把translate X降低。
接下来是在37帧的手部问题与参考有些不符合，因为我后面扩宽了时间轴，所以会导致动作和参考在时间上对不上，这是我的经验不足的体现。
然后就是第三个动作，支撑脚有些时候看上去比较直，真实情况应该是会弯曲一些。和上面的操作一样，我把所以第三个动作的点在曲线编辑器里调低。
再一次的，不要让腿看上去太直了。
Conclusion
After using a desktop computer to do animation I rarely encountered crash. But it took me nearly 10 hours to do this assignment, not including finishing my blog, which may be because I still need to improve my ability of animating.
But I believe that as long as I work hard, I can make progress from my failure.