We then were given a new rig to use - a ball with two legs (somewhat reminiscent of Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc)! This was very useful as it meant that we could grasp the basics of the walk cycle without having to worry about what happens with the rest of the body during a walk.
By changing the tangents to Linear and Stepped, it gives us control over what the rig is doing in the inbetweens, as opposed to Maya filling in the gaps incorrectly.
The first step was creating the main positions:
I added a plane above the rig so that I could judge how far up and down the body was moving; this helped give a sense of realism to the finished walk.
When the contact position is repeated (see '5'), the leading leg has changed. This means that when the other positions repeat, the adjustments for the legs have to swap around. Unfortunately, the 'copy paste' command doesn't work in Maya, so for each leg I had to individually type in each figure (translate xyz, heel pivot, ball roll, toe flop, etc).
To finish off, I cleaned up the animation by flattening tangents and smoothing the curves in the graph editor. This generally made the animation less jerky so that the rig could have a more fluid walk cycle.
As a first attempt, I'm happy with the finished product. There are alterations which could have been made to give the rig more personality (such as more emphasis on the swaying of the hips), but I think it works as a basic walk cycle.
There was little time for experimentation before we were given a brand new rig and a tutorial to follow. This meant I had to try to animate an entire body, which was substantially more challenging than only having to think about legs and hips!
This rig was a far sight more complex than the Mike Wazowski rig - you had the ability to edit movement of many different parts of the body (not just arms and legs)! This was great as it meant I had more control over what the body was doing, however it took a long time to get used to. The tutorial was in video format which meant that it was incredibly clear to follow and the voiceover explained the processes well for better understanding.
As I went through the tutorial, I took screenshots of each stage of animation and annotated what I was doing for every step. My memory isn't the strongest, so this means that if I wanted to make a walk cycle a year from now, I can look at these images again and understand clearly what to do.
There's little I can say in terms of evaluation, as I more or less just followed what the tutorial showed me. I do like the final outcome however, the body definitely appears to have weight and I like the slight bounce in its step. In fact, my main criticism would be with the camera work - I wanted to get it to glide seamlessly around the rig, pausing at 4 different angles, but it didn't quite work as planned.
The tutorial taught me a great deal in terms of how the body moves whilst walking - to what extent the head moves, the rotation of the hips, overlap in the wrists and so on. It also really emphasised how powerful the graph editor is and that even by changing one tangent, or adjusting one curve, the whole walk can be transformed.
After 5 weeks worth of using Maya, including some experimenting during the winter holidays, I thought it would be worthwhile documenting some of the things I'd learned. The document above contains a number of different commands, some more commonly used than others, and shortcuts for ease of use. Hopefully it will prove useful to me, especially as time goes on and I inevitably forget how to do simple commands in Maya; I will continue to update it as I learn more about the software.
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