Week 3: Walk Cycle Polishing

This week, I continued to work on the vanilla walk cycle with Jacko. I saved many iterations during this process as I was stuck on trying to loop the walk cycle using the pre and post-infinity cycle in Maya. Every time I had done so, the looped walk cycle would lag. So I went back in and added some more transitional poses to create a smoother loop and continuous curves in the graph editor.

I feel that in added these additional keys, it helped smooth out the walk cycle, especially with the back legs and tail. Using the feedback I received in class, I added some extra keys on the COG controller for the an extra bounce between the up and down poses of the walk cycle. I had also pushed the upper shoulder controllers to increase the reach of the front legs.

In these revisions, I was able to create smoother curves in the hip, shoulder, tail, and COG controllers. With these changes, the walk cycle feels more natural than it did the week before. I fixed some keys that got a little out of sync during this process before moving on to some animation in the collar and face.

The collar was a tad bit tricky, especially since I wanted the tag of the collar to imitate some drag between the swinging motions. After figuring out the timing of the collar animation, I worked a bit on the facial animation. As of now, I have the dog tongue sticking out a bit but I need to record some reference first to animate this further, which I will record later this week.

While most of the animation seems to be going along fine, I still am having trouble trying to fix the head movement. Most of the head movement is heavily influenced by the animation on the shoulder controller. This results in this fast and heavy swinging motions seen below. I tried to counter animate the head movement with the head controller but the controller only moves the rotations pivoting on the base of the skull. I'll continue working on fixing this issue and ask for help during class if I can't solve it.

This upcoming week, I hope to finish polishing this walk cycle in the graph editor. I'd like to also add some facial animation on the eyes and mouth, as well as some ear movement. After this week, I hope to start on the dog hop.