Introduction
Walking animation is another basis of game animation. I will design walking animation based on Xin’s character. In addition, referring to the animation in the game engine can better let me know how the walking animation is connected with the standby animation and running animation.
Process
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSWX3vEgRcE
I was hesitating whether to make 8 Way Directional Movement. I once wanted to help Zhu adjust walking animations in different directions, but the effect was not very good. I had to adjust each bone point directly. Until I saw the official tutorial, I can also use a simpler way to make my walking and running animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b9WM8TVdpA
Let’s take a look at the difference between the two:
Obviously one uses blend space 1D, and the other uses blend space. Breath of the Wild seems to use the former, because Link’s movement is more like the former. Observing Link’s walking carefully, you will find that his right hand is holding a sword, so the arc of motion will be smaller, while the left hand will be larger.
Now that I determined the type of production, I started to observe the animation in the game engine. Its default role is the same as mine, with the left foot in the front and the right foot in the back, so in order to be more natural, the walking animation will be in an ascending position at the beginning.
I realized that I haven’t done walk loop animation for a long time, and I even forgot how to do it! So I opened mixamo and unreal engine4 to observe the skeletal animation.
The first adjustment is always hips. I first determine its translateY, but this can only be a rough position, because I have to adjust it according to the movement of the foot.
In addition, I also want PoleLeg not to move.
The next step is to make walking animation routinely. I have recorded a lot in term1’s blog, so I won’t record it here. But this animation does not look natural. I went to check the curve editor again, and it turned out that the tangent position of the curve was wrong.
This looks much better.
At this time, I adjusted PoleLeg and observed their motion trails. In fact, I don’t need to do this step, but I want to make the animation more natural.
In addition, motion trails also have problems with hips. This is because I changed both 1F and 28F to flat in the graph editor, so the position is wrong.
But this animation is still very unnatural! And I found that I reversed the position of my feet! So I decided to do it again!
The same problem reappeared, knee pop. At first, I thought it was a problem with my production method, and I went to watch a tutorial until I found out that knee pop was mentioned in the video as an annoying thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynXadXE9UjU
Isn’t this the solution I am looking for! At the beginning, I attached a locator to the knee bone point to observe the motion trails, and changed the position of the knee by adjusting the translateY of hips. But this method is called the most troublesome method in the tutorial, which makes the animation dirty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLAnfsNqCQ0&t=609s
Alessandro Camporota also provided four other methods. In addition to modifying the weight and directly moving the fk, I tried to adjust the leg strength. But the rigging of adv has no leg strength, so I used lenght1 and lenght2 to solve my problem.
Now knee pop has been solved! Of course, I also went to the top view to check whether 8-shape looks good.
It is not difficult to adjust the spine. I gave up the pose I made before and re-adjusted the spine rotation.
But at this time there is an old problem: the motion trails are disconnected again. If the motion shape of the chest controller is incomplete, it may be that there is a problem with its parent controllers. Since the parent controller: Waist controller’s motion trails are okay, there is a problem with his curve, which affects the chest. After I checked it, I found that it has different values between 1F and 28F.
This looks much better.
In addition, I also adjusted the arm. The right hand is relatively simple, but I hesitated for a long time with the left hand. In the end, I chose to make the arm move more.
After adjusting the head movement and hair, I still added the animation of the sword and scabbard. Next time I must restrain the sword in advance, otherwise the initial psoe has to be changed all the time.
I took the finished animation to Yu for inspection. Hope she can provide some suggestions. Yu said that Xin’s head and left hand movements are a bit strange, and the curve of his hips is not obvious enough.
I also considered the curve of the hip. I rotated a larger value at the beginning, but Xin’s body would be too shaken. I hope he is in a strict state. But the animation is not good enough if I don’t do this. In the end, I chose to rotate it a bit more.
I started to adjust for the last time. Although I know that perfection is the best, under time constraints, I can only try to keep the animation as natural as possible.
Once the hips are moved and rotated, I have to rekey the controllers of the legs, which is really troublesome. I hope I can find a better way next time.
This is my walking animation.
Conclusion
Although I just briefly explained the process of making my walking animation! But this time I am really tired! I realized that my animation skills still need to be greatly improved, even though I have been studying 3D animation for a year.
Of course, I can’t completely deny myself. Compared to before, I at least knew where the pop might appear and found a solution. In addition, graph editor and motion trails can also be used proficiently by me.