Study Task 9 - Walk Cycles 2D, 3D and Beyond

This week was all about walk cycles. We were first thrown in the deep end and asked to try it out ourselves with our stop motion puppets.

Beryl puppet walk cycle

My puppet sadly has lead shoes and prefers to slide rather than walk, although it still came out better than I expected for a first attempt.

We were then taught how to do a basic 24 frame walk cycle by breaking it down into 8 frames and then tweening them until they amounted to 24 frames.

Basic 8 frame walk cycle learned in class

We then applied this to a character (or in my case, Mark from the Beano animation).

Guide for my Beano walk cycle (that I ultimately flipped for the scene)

Mark's walk cycle

Using what we learned with key frames and the graph editor in Maya, we made the Moom character walk too.

The Moom-Walk

What worked well:

• Both walk cycles turned out a lot smoother than expected
• Adding follow through to Mark's clothes

What could be improved:

• More experimentation to add character and emotion to a walk
• The follow through on Mark's hood could have been a bit better

Study Task 4 - Maya 5: Animation basics

In this Maya session we learned how to animate using keyframes and the graph editor. I was initially trying to animate the squash and stretch of a ball bounce by directly changing the size and dimensions of the sphere until we were shown how to use the squash property, though I think I need more practice playing around with this function because it ended up looking a lot less natural than my manual method. Given more time I would fix this.

What worked well:

• The motion was very fluid

What could be improved:

• Altering the easing and the values of the squash at certain points to make the movement look more natural