Walk Animation

The first animation I created was the walk animation. This is one which we worked on partly in lectures, which meant I was able to use plenty of the tips we were talk to make it look good. I first worked on the legs, animating them to moved forward and back only, to judge how far the characters stride would be. Next I animated the feet lifting up of the ground at the right point, so that it looked like actual steps forward were being taken. After that, tweaks were made to the angles of the feet, using reference of people walking to get this looking realistic.

Next I animated the arms, making them swing just slightly after the legs began to move as this slight time difference between the movements makes it look so much better than both the arms and legs beginning to move at the same time. I also set it up so that the fore arms would continue to swing slightly after the top half of each arm had stopped, again as this both looks better and better reflects the real movement.

With the arms and legs sorted, the main things left to do were animation the top half of the figure to move up as down as each step was taken, and to animate the shoulders and hips to rotate round as the respective arms of legs was moved forward or back. I also added a little animation to the head to make it move around slightly, just to stop it looking so rigid. As with all of the animations I'm going to do, I've added a blink to the walk animation.

The is a single cycle of the walk animation.

The is the walk animation shown looping.