Breaking Down the Reference Footage

Here is the reference footage that the above was taken from. Though no Oscar contender I believe my acting is suitable to develop into animation using the Moom character. In this piece I intend to drag out the lift a little more to create a greater sense of how heavy the object is, as well as perhaps begining with a little stretch and eyeing-up of the object to enhance the character.

Walking Funny

After developing a standard, realistic, yet slightly boring walk, I began to think about adding more character. I really enjoyed this and find Softimage a great piece of kit.

Bringing in the Arms

With the lower half working nicely, it was time to work on the arms. It seems that posing the arms at three points (each contact, and the passing postion) is enough to give a natural looking swing. Though the Richard Williams 2-d walk cycle guide obivously has arm poses for each stage of the cycle, Softimage inbetweens well for a simple arm swing.



Im pleased with this walk, it looks relatively natural and realistic despite the obvious cartoon nature of our character, and it was simpler to achieve than I expected. So I went on to have a little fun with characterised walks, which I shall post in due course.

Developing Steps

After showing my intial blocking of the lower half of the walk cycle, it was suggested that, to make my walk more realistic and less exaggerated, I take away some of the bounce. The Richard Williams guidlines we have been following portray a big drop from the waist on the 'down' and a high rise on the 'up,' bellow I have adjusted my to be a little more subtle.

Shuttlecock Bounce

As Googling 'Shuttlecock bounce' is pretty useless, and as I have some at home, I decided to quickly film a shuttlecock bouncing to aid my animation. I did this more than once as unlike a round ball the shuttlecock's bounce is rather unpredictable.




Based on this footage I developed a reference sheet, as with the other bonces:

Walking Further

Duting our lessons we are going to develop and polish a standard walk cycle, but, after blocking out the feet I decided to have some fun with Softimage and animate more. I started with trying to vary the walk a little, make it less standard and more characterful. After a couple of these, which are by no means perfect, but certainly a step in the right direction, I had fun creating a little YMCA jig.

Learning to walk

As we dive further into the world of Softimage, the topic of walk cycles is raised. Im suprised by how quickly I picked this up using the 3d software and the given rig, and found the process of simply blocking out the walk both enjoyable and straightforward. In comparison to working in 2d, where I found hand drawing the walk quite tricky, working in Softimage felt comforable. The rig is great to get hands on with, and I look forward to working on more character animation. The clip below is of my initail work on the bottom half of a walk cycle. Obviously I have a lot to polish up here, like incorporating the toes and foot roll, but for starters I'm pleased.

Moom reenacts his favourite films...