walk test

I wanted to do an initial walk test for various reasons. firstly to get used to the rigs themselves, but also to make the mistakes now that I would have made without testing in order to save myself much heartache when it comes to animating the real thing.

Here are two short reference videos to help me animate

And here is the test walk that I did. It is quite clunky but I think that is due to having too many key frames and not making the most of the graph editor. I stumbled across a problem at first which was the timing. By default the settings are at 30 fps so mid way through me animating I changed it to work with the reference footage and it completely screwed up my key frames. This is one lesson I will definitely take from this test!

A quick animation time lapse:

I think one of the main difficulties I encounter is that I get caught up too much on tiny little nuances in movement which in turn causes a very cluttered timeline and causes horrible popping and unnatural movement.

And here is a composite of both the test and the reference footage for comparison:

As you can see I was almost there, I should have used a longer reference clip to get more action in the test and I started the movement differently as it looked very odd for the character going from a relaxed pose. Also the head movements are out which makes it look slightly different and finally the popping of the leg at the end needs fixing.

I really enjoyed getting comfortable with the rig that I've got for my characters and learnt how to create the most effective workflow when animating my characters, such as working from the bottom to the top and focus on individual limbs of the character. There still needs to be more testing in terms of facial animation and cleaning up my early established workflow.