Did a little work on it today. I made the bounces a little faster, and added rotation. I was thinking about putting in some squash and stretch as well, but I'm not sure if it's needed.

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Thanks for the advice, TonyChau. I tweaked the initial fall a bit so it wasn't so abrupt and linear, but I'm still not sure if it's there yet. I think it looks better, though.

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Last edited by Strange0range (09-22-2011 4:38 am)

Hey again!

It looks better but you can still really push the spacing.  The idea is progressive spacing, with each frame there is a bigger gap added on to the spacing before it.  For example check your spacing at F35-36 and compare that again to F40-41.  The spacing there is pretty much the same when it would make more sense for F40-41 to be twice as big as F35-36.

Started working on a pendulum test. I was originally hoping to upload it on Monday, but that didn't work out. On a side note, I also figured out why the animation was playing faster in Maya than it was once rendered, so that helped lots.

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Last edited by Strange0range (09-28-2011 9:29 pm)

yep you got it!
I'm sure there's some minor tweaks...
...but it really isn't necessary.

This looks really strong!!
Move onto a different task!

The walk seems a bit stiff at the moment. There are two things I noticed that could use some work,

- Right when he puts down the foot (fr. 35), the toes seem to be stuck in air for a few frames instead of landing on the ground. Then there's only one frame (fr. 41) where the whole foot is actually on the ground. It is possible to walk like this, but not without the intention of keeping your toes up.

- You never lift your back foot as a whole, it's more of a roll where the toes are the last thing to leave the ground (so on frame 38-ish the toes should still be touching the ground)

In general the hip movement doesn't quite match the foot movement (meaning the feet are lifted way up in the air, but the hip barely lifts at all), so I'd probably make the feet a bit more subtle. Otherwise it looks good, the timing and spacing works. Good luck!

Went and looked at some other walk cycles to see if I was missing anything, and I came up with one or two things.

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I think you are trying to do too much too fast.  You need to shelve this walk cycle for now and go learn how to do a simple weight shift.  That is job number one.  Going from a swinging chain to a ball with legs is a huge jump.  Then trying to go strait to a walk cycle which is a very difficult technical thing to get right is a bad call.  I think you should do a weight shift first.  Then maybe a jump or weight lift.  After that come back to the walk. 

When you are ready for the walk I think you should go read THIS.  It is an amazing tutorial about doing walks which will help you immensely.

Last edited by AFightingPanda (10-15-2011 2:50 am)

Yeah something like that is fine.  You don't even need to have him really take a step.  The whole idea behind doing a weight shift is so that you are learning about shifting the weight of the hips and how weight interacts with the legs.  That is the key to that.  You can add a small step though if you want it just depends what you are interested in doing.  In my mind there is a really solid way of building up to doing full characters.

after the chain ball things....

1.  Luxo lamp hop cycle (get it here) - just have him hope is place.  Learn about overlap and adjusting things in the graph editor more efficiently.
2.  Luxo jump forward  - so this time just make him jump forward a few steps. 
3.  Ball with legs - weight shift
4.  Ball with legs, jump - have him jump in place, or jump down from a height, jump over a small obstacle.  etc, just something in that overall vein.
5.  ball with legs walk cycle
6.  full body character weight shift
7.  full body character weight exercise - lift a box, push a boulder, pull a cart, something that involves weight.
8.  full body walk cycle.

That would be my ramp up.  The reason you use the luxo rig is simply so that you can ramp up slowly.  Fewer controls to think about, less to fight with overall, you can just focus on making the movement nice as opposed to fighting with the controls.  Nothing sucks more than fighting with controls.  Then the ball with legs is an obvious progression.  After a few ball with legs tests its time to jump in and do full body stuff.  After the first few full body exercises that everyone does its up to you what kinds of shots you want to tackle.  As always keep at something till you get it.  If you are having trouble using luxo and getting good shots.  Keep doing shots with him until you got a handle on it.  The same with every test and every rig.  Don't just get the test finished and move onto the next one if you struggled.  A lot of animation is building a solid foundation and understanding of the principles.  Take your time and don't be afraid to ask questions.

Well, I finally got around to doing this; it was a little harder than I thought it might be, but I think I've got it looking pretty good now, though I'm certain there are some things left to fix.

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Well, he does straighten out, at least for one frame before leaving the ground and landing. Anyway, I went and tweaked a couple things, without really knowing what I was doing, and I actually found something wrong with the first test upon comparing the two.

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Alright, I tried it out, but it might need some tweaking.

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