Animation Mentor: Week 108 - Introduction to Walks

Hey all! Week eight has come and gone...and man..was it a biggie. I had some more corrections to make on previous work and of course new animation to produce. Here's an overview.

WEEK 8

This weeks lecture and assignment introduced us to Walks. I have had some experience with walk cycles, but still, I was reminded of some important things and shown some new things. All in all, reminded how walk cycles are truly some of the hardest things to get correct in animation. Partly because they use ALL the principles of animation. Once again, the week ended burning the midnight oil on Saturday night...but then again..what's new!!

NEW ASSIGNMENT

This week had EVERYONE doing the same VANILLA WALK. We were given BALLIE this week. He is a ball (never can get away from the ball and it's bouncing...NEVER!!!) with TWO legs. Ballie is the more fortunate older brother of ONE-LEG from last week. I just happened to wait until after the Q&A this week to start on my actual blocking. I sketched out the planning thumbnails, but that's about it. Here are the plans:



This week's assignment was to animate two complete steps with Ballie, in a side view and in Stepped mode. Basically the blocking stage of the walk. The other thing was that the walk was to be as mechanical and the same...VANILLA. There was to be no variation in anything from step to step. Sounds simple, right??? Wrong...VERY WRONG!!! Luckily, Victor gave us a Vanilla Walk Demonstration in our Q&A. I had been recording our Q&A's for a few weeks now (for my own review and not for distrubution, of course!!), and was SOO glad to have this one recorded. I had to go back and watch it a few times since my notes were not as strong as I'd have liked. Here's what I came up with for the blocking pass that I handed in:



After a couple weeks off from creating poses for the STU character, this week finds us creating a PHYSICAL STRENGTH pose for him. After the difficulty of the DEVASTATION pose..I was kinda glad to get something that was a little easier to visualize. But it also gave a little problem to come up with poses that weren't overused in this Animation Mentor assignment. Here's the sketchbook page of the pose choices:


Here's the pose I chose to put STU in. I had a few poses that I kinda liked..but wanted to a gymnastics pose..once again to use the years of participating in the sport. But the biggest challenge I had in choosing this pose, was the symmetry and "twinning" of the pose. So, I went against my better judgement and made the pose a little more off balance and tried to add interest. Check it out:


REVISIONS

Along with the new assignment, I worked on making revisions to the previous weeks stuff. In his E-Critique, Victor gave a more corrections on my REVISIONS of my Week 6 assignment, the Pendulum. This assignment is truly proving to be the bain in my Class 1. Here are the corrections from these latest comments:



I also then had some revisions for the TAILOR animation from last week. Overall, Victor liked what I did and I think I showed some good knowledge of what the assignment was getting at. As per usual, Victor tried to give me some tweaks that would make the animation better, and fix a few things with Tailor's tail. Here's what I did with his corrections.



Well..there's the update on Week 108 for ya. Next week we'll really get into the cleaning up of the walk and making it really look like a VANILLA walk...come back and check out what happens!!!