walk cycle attempt

[robcat2075]

Pretty good. Hard to judge without a body on top but it's a plausible walk.

hello people. i used the rig and tutorial by erik westlund found at http://www.ewestlund.com/tutorial.html
i would love some hard criticism :D and any tips on how to get the knees not to wobble.


walk cycle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVHT8gU4Kxo)

I guess you mean the knee pops , right?

If your rig supports it, you can slightly scale the length of the leg to affect the knee location. This is something you may have to track on a frame by frame basis.

lacking leg scaling, the alternative is to shade the amount the heel is raised. Again, this is a frame-by-frame polishing thing you do when everything else is ok.

[zanfb]

hey man. thanks for the reply.
the knee pops is exactly what i mean. i am working on it frame by frame.
i see where the problem lies, but im having a hard time fixing it. well i guess thats what this exercise is all about. i want to nail the legs first before i move to the whole body. but i might start over with another rig and do the whole body. maybe i wont have the kne popping. (but im sure a bunch of other stuff will cause me headaches)

oh yeah. almost forgot. nice 2d blog man.

[robcat2075]

In theory... if you have your feet and legs posed right and moving thru proper arcs you won't have any knee pops because in real life we don't have knee pops either.

But in real life we don't pose our legs with IK, our real legs are FK. The slightly wrong poses and arcs that are easy to do in IK are what is letting the knee pops creep in.

[erikwestlund]

Hey zanfb, nice to see people still trying to make use of that rig. Robert seems to have some good advice for you regarding how to deal with pops in the knees. Sorry the rig doesn't support scaling the legs/squash and stretch. I've found it better not to give that to students right off the bat. Makes them pay closer attention to details and to keep projects down to proper size until it is time to be more ambitious. If you haven't yet, take a look at the two close-up side views I created to go with the tutorial.

To critique your work I would say the basics are in place, you are learning what it takes to put polish on it. Good. Work more of Slow-in/Slow-out and follow through. Seems strange with a character that lacks a torso, head, arms, etc. You can allow the foot traveling back to follow through more as it is just being picked up. Give it more drag as it is lifted so that the toes point towards the place on the ground that it just left. Speed up the movement as the foot swings forward to take the next step, then ease it into the contact pose.

What you will get, I predict, is more contrast in the movement (ie more interesting), and you will find it easier to control how much the knee is bending or how it progresses from bend to straight. I watch two elements while finishing a walk-cycle, the values on Ball-Roll and how much the knee bend has changed from the previous frame.

The other area that you can put follow through in the walk is with the weight of the ball itself. Allow the ball to swing forward (tilting forward) after the down pose heading into the up pose, and allow the ball to drag on the way down (tilting backwards) as it heads out of the up-pose heading into the down pose. This element of drag should trail behind the up and down poses by at least 2 frames on a 24-frame cycle.

For more on drag in poses check out the tutorials on my blog:

http://pushingposes.blogspot.com/2008/03/basic-walk-cycle-part-1.html

http://pushingposes.blogspot.com/2008/03/basic-walk-cycle-part-2.html

hope this long-winded reply is useful. Cheers. -Erik

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