Walk In The Park....

As the Christmas count down begins I started my last two 2D and 3D assignments. Both tasks were the same for 2D and 3D, this was to make the character walk like we walk. For Maya we were given the Andy.rig, which was a more basic character model. To start with I filmed my walk. Here's the video I used:



After looking through my walk, i noticed two main characteristics which were

1) "Flicking" my legs out straight.

2) Shoulder sway

These were the two factors I wanted to put into my walk. I started with the 3D walk in Maya. My first decision was to start in the passing position as it would make it slightly easier to animate. Another decision I made early on was too animate it as I go along. I knew that my walk lasted 3 seconds so I was going to use around 72 frames however one thing I forgot to remember was the distance I was going to walk, which as it turned out wasn't such a bad thing. After doing a rough version I started to "neaten" it up, the first was to make sure the feet had the right 'flop' and bend properly when on the floor. However when I started to go through the frames it turned out that the feet were indeed sliding across the scene rather than staying still. This was due to me constantly pulling the legs and hips which resulted in the feet not touching the floor. The main problem I had with the 3D task was when ever I tried to stretch the leg out to give it the "flick" element, the characters knee would 'pop' and look odd, which meant I had to minimise the flick in the leg.

After sorting out the feet I went onto the shoulders. At the time I simply rotated the shoulders to give the appearance of them swaying but the turned out to look as if the were simply going up and down. I realise this was due to not adding and rotation to the midriff. Overall I wasn't too pleased with the walk, I wanted to make it smoother rather than all stuttered, I have a feeling this could be fixed in the graph editor, but it was a too daunting task to tackle after seeing the amount of lines there were. Here's the result:



Last but not least 2D, and this one I found easier than the 3D which was no doubt due to fact i had more control on how the characters walks. For the 2D I started by drawing a skeleton on each frame. After this i simply filled out the character to make it resemble me, however just as I finished all the frames I relised that I had done only 1 passing positions, this ment that the hips would switch over when its played back. To fix this I had to draw more frames in at the end, but I didn't add enough which makes my character look as if I walk with a limp. Heres how it turned out:




By the way I ran out of Black ink