Week 4 - Problems and Walk Cycle

This week I've been having a fair few problems. Initially, I planned to finish the extended idle. However, I hit a wall with that animation. Because of the way I twisted the arm to get him to flex his bicep, when refining the arm the shoulder started twisting in on itself in an unnatural way. I tried several ways to get around this. I found that I could get around it by using more keyframes with smaller movements but this would involve restarting my work. This frustrated me a little so I decided to keep the work I had for reference and move on to a different animation for now. I decided on the walk cycle as we had gone over it in class so I understood the basics of the animation.

I began by trying to transition him into the first step. This stumped me. I couldn't seem to get a natural looking transition between the idle and first step. After being blocked by this for a while, I decided to simple do the walk cycle separately and creation the transition another time. Whilst creating the walk cycle, I worked using the following image for reference.

Walk Cycle Reference

Initially, I planned to give him some swagger in his walk but I decided later that it would be easier to make the base walk cycle and then edit it later to give it more character. Overall, the walk cycle is nearly done, It loops and works reasonably well but needs a few changes still. The arms seem a little robotic and the footsteps need to be larger. Also, I feel that the head needs to bob to an extent for emphasis. Despite this, I feel I'm making steady progress.

The Walking Man