Proposal Submission
Today marks the first day since the liberation from the proposal.
It has finally been conquered and submitted. Now I can finally (use informal
language!) start animating again.
The dawn of a new...animation(for this project)
Today I have started out by doing a simple walk cycle, with many
issues. The first one was overcome reasonably quickly, it was more to do with
scraping off some rust for the technical sides of things. I was forgetting to
key frame some controllers here and there and I kept braking the rig somehow.
The second aspect, perhaps the more confusing one....how do I add personality
to a walk cycle?
This link below has helped me to start testing out how to add
personality to walk cycles.
"When creating a walk your first thought might be
okay, twelve frames per step with the typical poses for the contact, down,
passing and up positions. sure, this is a great formula for a default walk
cycle, but it's not that exciting."
This quote from the link basically tells me that the traditional
12 frame per step walk cycle is good but it does not allow for much
personality.
"Find ways to exaggerate a walk cycle. If a
character is very happy and is walking down the road push their poses to really
communicate this, and vary the timing where you need to in order to really help
sell the character’s current mood. You can see an example of an exaggerated
walk in the video above."
This quote above talks about adjusting the actual timing of
the frames to better represent the mood of a character. This would be instead
of the usual way of doing a walk cycle which I have used for the last few years...
...I was struggling to see
how I could transform a normal walk cycle (created by the above method) into a
character performance. It turns out that the answer may be that I don't just
follow my normal method. I need analyse the sort of mood I am going for...
"A great way to experiment with a walk cycle is to
switch up the typical posing for a default walk, as well as the typical
positions of each key pose. For example, you could have the contact pose be the down position, or have the highest position be the contact pose."
I need to
analyse performances and see where the key poses fit onto the scale. I had
never thought about changing the heights of the poses around. I came into
animation today with the intention of doing my usual walk cycle then adjusting
it to give the character a personality, but that proved difficult to work out.
In the next few days, hopefully I will do a few different walk cycles examining
this way of working.
Summary:
Richard Williams' books (Animators Survival Kit) could prove useful here since it is full of walk cycles. I basically need to do several walk cycles to try and successfully create different personalities.
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