Week 8- Assignment #7 Part 1

Week 8 was a bit more challenging because on top of revising our Tailor assignment we also had to plan and block out our vanilla walk assignment and create a new pose with Stu. I was excited to start walks though! This week we had to do a vanilla walk with the character Ballie, which means it has no personality, it is just a plain old walk. Normally a character would have some sort of personality or a different beat of steps but this assignment is just to learn the basics of a walk. Luckily the vanilla walk was kind of spelled out for us- there's specific poses that are supposed to be happening at specific frames, which we learned in the lecture. A normal step takes one second, or 24 frames, so we had to break it down by extreme poses, extreme down poses, passing poses, and extreme up poses, which are shown here in my planning.

Here the ball acts as the root/hips of the character. We need to keep in mind what the hips are doing when we walk and how and when they rotate. Even though the walk was pretty straight forward, executing it Maya was still a little difficult. You have to make sure you balance the root in between the feet just right, because if the stride is too far or too short you are going to get messed up later in the walk. I did end up encountering this problem.

Here is my blocking pass for the walk in stepped mode. What this means is that just the main poses I had drawn in my planning are blocked in and so that's why it is a little jagged. So in the graph editor, where we can see all of our animation represented by lines or curves, they look like little steps. Once we go in and refine the animation we switch to spline mode and the curves are more of an S shape so the animation is more flowy and we can tweak it more specifically and add in betweens. Mike gave me some good feedback for moving forward and helped adjust some of my key poses. For instance, he said I needed to tweak my down pose by making the knee go more over the foot, showing that the foot is really taking the weight of the step. Getting these poses right are key because that's what makes the weight and balance of the character more believable. He did notice I was counter-animating the root because, as I said earlier, the distance in my stride was too large and as I got further in the animation the root became less and less balance so the feet were getting away from it. I made sure to address that in the following week!