Walk Cycle

 This weeks task was to create a  walk cycle using a reference. This has been my most favourite task so far. Much like the jump, i found a reference of an angry woman walking and took this as my main point of reference.

The same as before with the jump, i blocked out the movement of the model in the cycle. I began with the feet, moving them into place and then i finished with the arms. Once this was all completed i began adding in more detail, like shwoing the *high point* at the top of part of the cycle and shoulder and head movement. The hardest part was adding in the movement of the feet. They where a pain because of thier timing when rotating. Overal though i was pleased with the finished result...

      

Leg and Jump Cycle

This week, Phil showed us how to create a basic pair of legs, and how to make them "ski shuffle" to block out a walk cycle. Using the joint tool and I.K handles, we created some simple legs that had the same movement as what a rigged model would have.

Once these where created, we gave them quick keyframes and the start and finish of a 24 frame (1 second) animation and created a sliding shuffle movement. This was to help us get a better understanding of how to create animations with joints and skeletons etc.

Our task this week, was to find reference for a jump animation. The point of the exercise was to show that everything that moves has potential energy, and that people "prepare" or "build up" to a movement. This is particularly observed in a jump animation. 

I went on to youtube and found an animation reference of a man doing a crouching jump. I liked this as it showed alot of preperation.

 

 Using this as my reference i blocked out the jump, adding in a couple more squats to show more anticipation for the characters movement. Once blocked, i began moving the arm joints, changing the facial features, moving the torso to show the shift and balance and moved the foot and leg joints to get a smooth jump arc. The final result is below.

         

It was very difficult to get a smooth arc to his jump and i had to add lots of movement keyframes within the joints of the body to get a full natural swing of balance. The other challenge was the knees and feet, which change rotation when airbourne. It took me a while to smooth this out so it looked natural.

Obstical course

This week we were assigned the task of creating an obstical course which demonstrated some squash and stretch. I started by mapping out a brief sketch of how i wanted the animation to flow and annotated where the ball would squash etc.

  

Once i had completed this, i made the course in maya and began blocking out the animation, simply by inserting movement keyframes without adding any bounce. I decided to use the ball as the rubber foam ball that i used in the first ball task, as this would demonstrate the correct amount of squash and i already new the average bounce time for th ball of this kind. From here i then inserted more keyframes to make the arced bounce motions and i added in the scale keyframes to give the squash and stretch. 

The rest of my time after this was spent tweaking what i had trying to get as smooth an animation as possible, mostly by inserting more keyframes to create a better arc of the ball. Bellow is the final animation.