Animation Mentor - Class 1 - Week 8

Walking, walking, walking... This week we are doing a walking assignment with our new character, Ballie. We had a big lecture about how to block in a walk, starting with the contact poses (where the forward foot makes contact with the ground), on to the breakdowns (where one foot passes the other), and then adding the extremes, extreme down (as you catch your weight after the contact) and extreme up (the highest point of the walk before the contact). We were also explained how walking is a controlled fall. And that as bipeds what we are doing when we walk is loosing our ballance and falling... until catch ourselves with our forward foot... then doing it all over again. :-) Think about it, if you don't put your foot in front of you when you walk, you would fall flat on your face!

Here is my planning for the animation of the walk.


Here is my first blocking of a walk. As you can see I have only put in the contacts, breakdowns and extremes at frames 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24. The whole cycle takes 24 frames, or one second.



This week was also pretty tough because I had to go to Dallas for Verizon. But the cool think was that it gave me a chance to do a lot of stuff on the boat, like read the animator's handbook and work on the planning sketch.

I'll be updating later this week with a cleaned up walk cycle... it's going to look smooooooth!