I'm back again with another late post! This time we're looking at walk cycles. A simple walk cycle is based on 4 key poses: contact, down, passing, and up. These poses are timed at specific intervals so that certain frames called inbetweens can be put in between. This makes for a smoother motion and also makes sure the action takes the right amount to time to happen. The picture below is of a template for a walk cycle at 24 frames per second, which is the standard for animation.
To do this in Blender, I wanted to first make some changes. When I made animations before, I used a setting called interpolation. Interpolation takes the keyframes (in our case these four poses) and fills in the inbetweens for us. However, I wanted to try a different setting called constant. This has no interpolation, and just holds the frame in its entirety until the next frame. I have to pose every keyframe myself without the software doing it for me. It also makes the animation look choppier, which I kinda like.
What we have so far is just the four key poses, making it only eight frames in total, and it's already looking pretty nice! Well, at least I hope it does. The animation is still too choppy, though, so it's gonna need some inbetweens. I like the motion right now, so I fear that adding inbetweens is going to ruin it by making it too shaky because I can't do inbetweens well.
The finished walk cycle is kind of jittery and stiff. It kinda feels like a crappy stop-motion animation lol. I think that's mainly because I posed every frame of this, which is what happens in stop-motion animation. Although, the stiffness of the motion is not a product of the stop-motion style. That's just because I had a hard time trying to put some more fluidity into it. Since I animated on every frame, that made the animation lose some of its charm from when it was choppier, in my opinion. It also made it look super shaky and weird. I wish I had planned it out more, and just animated on twos from the get-go.
To do this in Blender, I wanted to first make some changes. When I made animations before, I used a setting called interpolation. Interpolation takes the keyframes (in our case these four poses) and fills in the inbetweens for us. However, I wanted to try a different setting called constant. This has no interpolation, and just holds the frame in its entirety until the next frame. I have to pose every keyframe myself without the software doing it for me. It also makes the animation look choppier, which I kinda like.
What we have so far is just the four key poses, making it only eight frames in total, and it's already looking pretty nice! Well, at least I hope it does. The animation is still too choppy, though, so it's gonna need some inbetweens. I like the motion right now, so I fear that adding inbetweens is going to ruin it by making it too shaky because I can't do inbetweens well.
The finished walk cycle is kind of jittery and stiff. It kinda feels like a crappy stop-motion animation lol. I think that's mainly because I posed every frame of this, which is what happens in stop-motion animation. Although, the stiffness of the motion is not a product of the stop-motion style. That's just because I had a hard time trying to put some more fluidity into it. Since I animated on every frame, that made the animation lose some of its charm from when it was choppier, in my opinion. It also made it look super shaky and weird. I wish I had planned it out more, and just animated on twos from the get-go.
While doing this I found out that trying to animate full poses between keys was not the way to go. It was time-consuming going back and forth and checking the entire thing. What I should have done would be to start off with the most bare-bones keys as a reference, and then start from the beginning and animate one body part at a time, all the way through. I was forgetting the overall motion of the character's body and so the finished product ended up moving awkwardly. I don't know the "proper way" to animate 3d characters but doing one part at a time works for me. I did have fun making it though, and the details--like his helmet bouncing or his grenades shaking--were fun to work on.
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