To get us going, we firstly learned the basics of a walk cycle, learning about key frames, extremes and in-betweens which are the basic fundamentals of any forms of animation. For reference we looked at how people in the public walked sketching there movements and walk styles as they went past. Also looking at Richard Williams Animation Survival Kit book looking at his explanations and examples of walk cycles (as seen bellow-).
To try to get to grips with these techniques we firstly did hand drawn animations of which we created a simple character that we would animate key frames for and then get into pairs and our partners would animate our in-betweens and vice versa.
For this I wanted to keep my character simple, my partner Zoe animated the in-betweens, something of which for the first time is actually really difficult to do, but however I think she did a great job! Don't u think?
In my next hand drawn animation I wanted to try doing it on my own to see if I could correctly pull off a convincing walk.
In this one I originally tried animating the arms of the character but I found it confusing so decided just to animate the legs for now. Overall however I am really happy with the characters leg movement and felt for my next one I could move on to animating arms as well.
For this one I just used the previous walk cycles body and animated the arms over top. Something which I think made animating a bit more difficult as I feel that the arms kind of look disconnected from the body in a way, looking like there slightly out of sync. Colouring the hands I feel distracts the eye from following the movement of the arms and makes the point were they pass the body not right, something of which I overall was not happy with.
I moved on from this, determined to make a better arm swing using my square character I created as my next guinea pig.
This was finally the point were I felt I achieved a decent arm swing, basically by keeping the arm motion simple. In the end I was happy with this little characters walk cycle and felt that finally I was getting somewhere.
We then moved onto animating in the form of stop-motion, something which we needed to create our own models for. The model making process was surprisingly very eye opening and fun to do as at this point we were only creating a basic wire frame character of which would animate on top of a board filled with holes. These holes were for screws that would go into the feet of our wire frame models making the more secure for when it came time to animate. This was the result of my first attempt...
Did you see the magical appearing drill?
While making this animation I encountered a lot of problems with the model itself as the putty we used to keep the nut on the feet secure was still sticky and had not set yet (of which I believe was due to the putty not being mixed properly) which meant that the character would not stand up right and became hard and annoying to animate. Overall though I thought my walk turned out ok and had potential but the problems put me off a bit.
Not being a quitter, I wanted to give it another go once the feet on the model had set a bit more as I knew I could make the walk better. I also added some masking tape round the frame to beef the character out a bit more and made him more visually appealing and easier to see.
This time I was much happier with the way the way the character moved, besides the pictures exposure making it a little harder to see I felt that this was definitely an improvement over the previous stop-motion.
The third area of animation we tried was 3D animation, in which we used the software Maya to make a pre-rendered model (Norman) walk. We got taught the basics of the software how to create shapes and edit parts of them also how to move and edit Norman himself, using FK and IK. FK being a mode in which if you moved one part of Norman, say his foot the rest of the leg would follow, and IK being the mode in which you have to move every individual part of him. Overall I found myself more prone to using IK as I felt it gives you more control over the characters movements. Anyway we also learnt how to animate models using again key frames, but this time Maya renders the in-betweens automatically so it is relatively quick to animate once you have a grasp of how to work Maya.
Here was my first attempt...
And my second...
In this one I wanted to give Norman a bit of character making him into a happy chappy which I think I successfully managed to achieve.
I quite enjoyed working in all of these different mediums of animation, overall being quite happy doing all of them, though the stop-motion element was weaker but this was just because of the model itself. In the end I felt I have managed to create some convincing walk cycles, something which I feel I will ultimately and definitely be using in my future animating endeavours.
I also did a Christmas themed walk cycle, the Christmas pudding character you might be seeing in the future...
No comments:
Post a Comment