#043 GAD BA2 - P1: Animation Assignment

With the tutorials finished now in animating the MooM rig, we have pretty much been left to our own devices to come up with the 3 animation cycles (walking, running, and jumping). From the tutorial and a bit of work at home I already had a fairly good working point of the first/last pose. To widen my understanding of animating a walk cycle I began to do some research. I found a great website called Digital Tutors, it is a community made website where experienced digital artists can share their knowledge in the form of tutorials. The tutorial that I found was of animating a rig similar to the MooM, perhaps a bit more advanced, however I found the tutorial to be a great help. It explained the poses in the animation, key frames, using the graph editor and how to create a realistic walking animation. I found an image of the poses within the walking cycle, shown below, which I used as a rough reference for my walk cycle.

Below is an image my poses in comparison to the ones above. My poses are a lot less exaggerated, as I thought that when people walk they do not move their arms with much exaggeration unless they are power walking.

To get to this stage I edited the points of all the rigging; toes, feet, knees, hips, spine, upper body, shoulders, arms, elbows, hands, fingers, thumbs, neck and the head. While some movements are more noticeable, there are some subtle movements in the animation that add realism to it such as the curling and uncurling of the fingers on the arm movements, the slight bob of the head and neck and even the slight outward position of the knee on the step down. Below is the result:

I will visit the walk cycle later to edit the graph and improve the animation, but for now I will move on to the run cycle. The run cycle is going to be fairly similar to the walk cycle only that it will be at a faster pace and much more exaggerated. Below are my poses for the run cycle:

Just like with the walk animation, I edited many of the rigging points. I exaggerated the movements a lot more and changed the overall poster, learning the MooM forwards as is common when running (not sprinting). The arms are a lot more rigid, bent up and tight to the body allowing for a quicker swing. Below is the result:

Again, I have not yet made any changes in the graph editor, I will visit it later once I have done the jump cycle.

The next cycle is the jump cycle, I put a bit of thought into what style of jump I wanted to use and in the end I finally decided to use the first pose from my run cycle and create a running jump. That way if you put the  walk cycle, the run cycle and the jump cycle back to back, it would provide a seamless animation of all 3 movements. Below are the 9 poses I used:

Similarly to the walk and run cycles I edited all the rigging points, below is the result without using the graph editor:

Once again, I have not yet made any changes in the graph editor, I will now go back to the walk cycle and make some changes. Watch this space! No really... watch it.