Wed, December 9, 2009
Walkin' After Deadline—12:53 PM
I very nearly missed my submission deadline this week to convert my walk animation into a personality walk. To begin with, I polished last week's walk, adjusting all the little areas I hadn't quite perfected the first time. This would be the foundation for my new walk, so I needed it to be its best.
There remain a couple of pesky wobbles in the knees, an artifact of IK (inverse kinematics), where I have no direct control over his damn knees, but can only position his hips and feet and let the computer place the knee in between. I'm really pleased with how far I came on this problem, but I couldn't spend all day on it, since I had a personality walk to create also.
My first choice for a personality walk was something akin to the Verbal Kint limp from The Usual Suspects, but I was advised against doing anything quite so subtle, since it needs to "read" in the rather small viewer window we have on the site. I settled on a very determined, brusque, sped-up walk, and set about putting in the hip rotation and ample stride length that would bring that about. Clearly there is still a long way to go, but luckily this is another two week assignment, so I will continue refining. Here's the blocking pass – again, it's a little jumpy because there isn't animation on every frame, and in this case it's not a full render but a "playblast" which is Maya's version of just a quick output of the animation to see how things are coming together, without all the bells and whistles (such as anti-aliasing, for those readers familiar with that term).
Bee Boy — Fri, 12/11/09 10:17pm
By the way, if you hate the blocking pass for the "determined" walk, you are in the majority! I have started again from scratch, and I'm working around the clock to create something better. I even shot video reference of myself performing the walk, just like a real professional animator! (The early lectures at Animation Mentor exhaustively stressed the point that video reference is a good thing and important in the research process, in stark contrast to motion capture or "performance capture" รก la Avatar or Beowulf, which is – of course – the spawn of Satan.)