AN02 - “Body Mechanics” - Assignment 02 - The Full Body “Vanilla” Walk
If you’re going to learn to be an illustrator, then you have to study the human form. Usually this means figure drawing. Sketching out how people look in “every day poses” like sitting or standing. In the animation world, the full body walk is akin to that process.
Every person who is able to walk has a basic gait that is shared by all humans. Walking upright is something that is truly unique to the human species. Even though a bear or a chimpanzee is able to walk upright, they have not evolved to walk that way,
To compound the challenge, each of us has subtleties to the way we walk that are unique and no two people will walk the same. An old person doesn’t walk the same as a child. A person who is injured doesn’t walk the same as a healthy person. Zombies? don’t get me started on zombies.
The goal for assignment number 2 is to create a “vanilla” walk. The kind of walk cycle that could be applied to any bipedal character. In this case, the female character “Stella”…
INSERT STELLA STILL IMAGE HERE
It seemed strange to use a female character rig and make a walk cycle so generic that it could be also be applied to a male character, so I decided to make the project more challenging by creating a vanilla FEMALE walk cycle.
Men and women do NOT walk the same. Because of the whole childbearing thing, our hips are built differently and that has a huge impact on how women move when they walk.
Step 01 - Reference…
Normally I would try to act out the action I was trying to animate, but last time I checked, I’m NOT a woman, so I needed to find a suitable female walk cycle reference… THANK YOU, YouTube…
INSERT YOUTUBE VIDEO LINK TO ORIGINAL WALK CYCLE REFERENCE
Step 02 - Breaking down the movement…
A biped walk cycle can be broken down into these key poses that are repeated for each foot…
INSERT BALLIE WALK POSE REFERENCE STILL IMAGE
Looking at the female walk reference, pulling out the key poses, and then sketching on top of them gives me an insight on how the hips and shoulders move during the cycle…
INSERT FEMWALK-LAYERS.PNG STILL IMAGE HERE
For this particular female walk, there is an interesting thing that she does with her legs and hips. You’ll notice on the up pose that her leg goes completely straight, and to compensate for this straight leg, her hip on that leg rises up and her shoulders counter rotate to keep her from bobbing dramatically up and down each time her leg straightens.
It causes a swaying of the hips that is more than a little bit distracting LOL. But with that understanding I’m ready to move into 3D…
Step 03 - Blocking in the walk…
“Blocking in” is the process of posing the character in the key positions to tell the “story” you’re trying to communicate. In this case, the key poses are the 4 poses for each foot of the walk.
I’m not trying to worry about what happens in between each pose. Just getting those poses to happen at the right time.
A human takes a step about every 12 frames, so two full steps is about a second, or 24 frames in animation terms. Here’s my initial blocking…
INSERT WK-03 MOVIE HERE
I was trying to capture that “straight leg” driven hip movement that was so interesting in the reference video. Note how the hips and shoulders counter rotate to accommodate the action?
I kind of over did it on the side to side movement, and the most important feedback from the instructor was to minimize that. It’s especially visible in the front view.
I also needed to have a more narrow position on her feet. Women “tend” to put one foot in front of the other when they walk and they also have their feet turned outward more.
With a bit of tweaking, I went for creating the in betweens to smooth out the motion. This process is called “splining” and here’s what I turned in the next week…
INSERT WK-04 MOVIE HERE
Note the feet and less side to side movement of the head and upper body? I also added in overlapping motion on the hands and ponytails.
It’s much closer now, but the hands are much too “floppy” for how calm the walk is and I needed to tone that down as well as fix some popping in the knees.
INSERT WK-05 MOVIE HERE
Overall it’s much much smoother now, and I’m happy with how it turned out! Here’s all of the steps side by side…
INSERT PROGRESS VIDEO HERE
