...don't run before you can walk-cycle

Ah the walk cycle, how much I dislike you. I can walk...along a path, that's fine and dandy. But I cannot for the life of me work out how to walk on the spot! I can animate the first step but it gets to the pass where step two begins that I struggle. I plan on finding/making some reference videos but on a treadmill - the issues I find are with sliding the fore foot backwards as the second foot steps forward.

Stop Motion Task

The task for this was to create a paper + split pin character in profile that we could then animate a walk cycle with. The pupped was somewhat awkward to animate due to the fact that the split pins had been pushed through, thus making a straight 'hole'. This became problematic in that it made rotating the various limbs difficult as the straight 'hole' didn't allow for much turning - a punched round 'hole' would have been better.

CG Task

For this week, the CG task was more open to interpretation. The real point was to play around with Maya in any form you felt most leant towards in terms of what sort of specialism you ideally want to go for. So, the set task was essentially to put into practice all the various bits and pieces learnt so far and use them to do SOMETHING. By something, this could be animating a pre-made character rig, creating simple expressions (i.e. the facial task using blend shapes and control points) or building basic character 'shells' using polygons and such.

I decided to focus on animating a pre-made rig I had downloaded called Blake - he was a fully functioning character with many different movement possibilities ranging from head to toe. My favourite part of this set up was the amount of facial motion available - this allowed me to play around with different head/face actions to try and portray a particular emotion/reaction.

Also, I tried out several walk cycles in different styles (i.e. creeping, running, strolling) to practice walk cycles as well as get to grips with actually animating in Maya.

I felt the CG walks were a lot better than the stop motion ones - spacing and timing of frames seems to come a lot easier in Maya than under a linetester. Time for a lot more practice in both!