11/03/13 - Walk Cycle Practice

Today we were asked to download a familiar human animation rig from moodle, this guy:

For the majority of the lesson we were supposed to just be following our lecturers instructions as he walked us through the creation of a simple walk cycle using this rig. As i have been creating animations for the last month in Professional Team Brief i decided i would have a go at creating something a bit different. Note the crosses in front of the models knee joints, these not only allow you too move the knees, but also to dictate which way the knees bend.

So today i decided i would create a walk animation using a backwards knee joint. Here's what my starting point looked like!:

I made sure i arched the back of the model to compensate for the different balance postion required by the odd leg structure, but i'm quite happy with how it looked.

Below you can see the animations i made using this setup. I made sure the weight was shifted from left to right as each step is taken and as you can see in the second cycle i exaggerated this movement. I allowed 30 frames for a single step, with the second cycle differentiated by its high cross over point.

Whilst not entirely convincing from the angle i've rendered i'm still happy with the outcome as being able to work with a backwards knee joint will come in handy when animating any animals that have leg structures like this.