This week we explored weight shifts a bit further and also started work on our walk cycles, two key components to a good character animation! Weight distribution and timing are aspects that must work together in harmony in order to give a character life.
A structured pose-based blocking approach helped me visualize how my character is going to walk across the screen. Making sure that the knee controllers were placed in a way that didn’t cause them to pop during the movement was a challenge I didn’t expect, but helped me understand anatomy and physics that comes into play.
Subtle hip swaying can leverage otherwise insignificant aspects of a simple rig in order to convey personality, I’m making sure to keep things simple for this exercise though. I intend to utilize parts of the rig I overlooked such as the toe roll in order to give it a better and more refined look.
Feedback gave me a helpful look into some aspects I didn’t include in this attempt, rotating the body downward to better portray its intention and weight while moving ahead, and also progressing the animation slightly as the knees pass each other in a swinging motion will communicate a sense of momentum.
Raising the heel as the character moves upward adds spring to the movement, and acts as overlapping action with the knee raise.
I notice that the right knee here doesn’t look right, I think I mean to convey a sense of weight shift but it ended up looking unnatural and pop-y. This will be changed in the next iteration, the character also moves too straight for it to look at all relaxed and natural.
Here, I focused on the main poses and had the character move between them. By playing around with the keys and changing a few of the poses I intend to make this weight shift a lot more dynamic and realistic.