Session 7 - Walk Cycle

Click the image to view the animation.

GIF loop

For my walk cycle, I decided to use a different rig as I could be more expressive using a character that has different body proportions. I used the UltimateBeefyRig which can be found here: https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/51300/download_page

I first decided to find a good reference that I could use so I managed to find a YouTube that specialises in creating video references for animators. The video I used is shown below:

Once I had everything set, I decided to key out the major 4 poses. I also made sure that I exaggerated some parts in order to express the movement. Since the character is quite big, the movement should be slightly slower compared to a thinner model/being. 

Each pose would be 1 keyframe long meaning there would be 4 poses in 4 frames. Once the key poses were done, I then set the timescale to 24 fps and to 24 frames. This ensured an even number of frames that was easily adjacent with the number of key poses I had created. 

 

After this, I then spaced out the key-frames using the graph editor. Here I started to adjust the timing of each action. Shortly after this, I moved onto the final part of adjusting the curves to better suit the animation. This mean including things like slow in and slow out, ease in and ease out, moving key-frames behind or ahead of each other to create follow-through actions and secondary actions.