Walk Cycle & Jump

This assignment has taught he to carefully study the shifting weight of the body in order to make the animation as realistic as possible. I have noticed that the upper body and lower body rotate in opposite directions while the body is moving. This is to maintain the balance of the body.

In order to make the walk cycle look more realistic, I shifted the feet a little inwards because the feet are too far apart to maintain the body's balance. It is also easier to animate bacause I do not need to constantly shift the body control greatly for each step the character makes so that the body can maintain balance.

I think that the swinging of the arms can be done better. I reduced the arc of the swing because the character is walking slowly. Since the character is walking slowly, the strength in the arms has to be little.

I had to use the graph editor regulary to create nearly identical steps for the walk. I feel that doing this is faster than positioning each pose individually. I set all of the keys that I need first and adjust the values in the graph editor.

In this video, I made the character climb up stairs and jump off. I had to adjust the characters bottom spine so that the legs can come high enough to climb the stairs. I also made the character lean forward so that the character can maintain balance.

When the character lands, the feet touch the ground at an angle. I needed to rotate the feet back to normal so that the character can stand up later. I used a slide so that the errors in rotation cannot be seen easily.

Since the character stopped abruptly, I added follow-through to the body, causing the body to continue moving slightly while the feet are at the same position. I also used the foot roll to show that the charatcered stopped on his toes rather than his whole foot.

In this subject, I studied the movements of people or objects to be able to animate effectively. I have learned that it takes time, patience, experience and knowledge to be a good animator. I have also learned to use which rig for which occasion. It is important because it could lead to animation errors that cannot be solved.

In all, I feel that I have learned a lot from this subject and have gained something from this experience.