Week 1: Quadruped Walk Cycle Block

For my first project in Senior Portfolio, I want to try my hand at quadruped animation. For the next few weeks, I'll be working on a Dog walk cycle animation. My goal at the end of this project:

• create a vanilla walk cycle
• create a characterized walk cycle

Jacko Rig on GumRoad

When looking for rigs for this project, I decided to outsource a rig from GumRoad and use a cartoon-like Shiba for my animation. The rig took me some time to learn, especially learning the IK and FK switches for the legs. This especially gave me trouble when I was testing out passing and contact poses. 

Dog Walk Cycle from The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams

What I chose to reference for the first pass was the visual from The Animator's Survival Kit. The image helped me get an idea of the amount of poses that would be needed for the walk cycle and the movement of the legs.

In Maya, I imported the reference as an image plane to use as a guide. As seen in the GIF below, I used the poses drawn for the first walk cycle. What I forgot about walk cycles is that the movement need to stay within the world controller. Hence, why there's a weird lag between the movements and the jagged movement forward. 

Current WIP of Walk Cycle

Another key difference from the rig and the image reference, is the fact that it is the walk cycle of a large dog breed in comparison to the small dog rig I'm using. To fix this difference, I also found a walk cycle video of a small dog which will help with the posing and movement of the paws.

Small Dog Walk Cycle Reference

These next few days I'll be working on refining the walk cycle and making adjustments to make a smoother walk cycle. I'll also be using this YouTube tutorial as reference.

Apart from the project that I have started already, I created a short list of projects I'd like to work on with an estimated timeline of when I will start each project.

Planned Projects for the Spring Semester:

• Creature/Monster Animation - March 10th
• Idle animation
• Attack Animation
• Biped Animation - April 7th
• Stylized Attack Animation (Weapon)
• Wounded Animation