Initially taking into account the diversity and potential of the Walk Cycle, it is a vital part of animation to learn to do effectively at first without excessive amounts of character and embellishment. Taking reference from Richard Williams, the key poses of the basic walk cycle are as follows –
Looking at this, the basic walk cycle has 5 key poses to achieve a realistic movement. When beginning my animation, I referred to the ‘Animators Survival Kit’ (Williams, 2009) to get the key poses.
Blocking Stage
During this stage, the blocking emanated key poses referencing Richard Williams’ method and trying to think about details such as ‘flops’ in the feet that add a kind of ‘silly’ charm to them when slightly overaccentuated. Bearing in mind the real-life centre of gravity that takes affects the ‘swaying’ and side to side motion of human walking that conveys weight at this stage.
Cleanup
When going through the process of cleaning curves, turning on pre and post infinity cycles will continuously loop the animation and help see more clearly, errors in the graph editor. This is the stage where I cleaned and polished issues and unnecessary keys, creating cleaner arcs by manipulating different handles and tangents.
After cleaning, and the addition of squash and stretch, I animated the walk cycle to begin to walk forward in 3D space. Using locators to mark the position of the feet, I moved the body forward and lined the feet up with the locators every time the foot left/joined the ground. Using a clamped tangent too help keep the foot grounded and prevent as much slipping as possible to keep this clean.
Preventing knee clipping as much as I could on the piece of animation, I used the body and rotation on the foot to minimise drastic movements in the knees and tried to keep it as steady as possible. In the case of a more complex motion and rig, this solution may not prove as effective, however, and may need to be changed by editing aspects of the rig (e.g. making an individual knee controller).
Finished Result
Adding more characteristic details such as the movement of the moustache and changing the character’s colours gave them more appeal in the finished result. As a final product, the walk seems to emanate a happier, more bouncy emotion behind it, which in future I could expand on by honing down on the character in a more complex rig.
References
Williams, R., 2009. The Animators Survival Kit. Faber.