Animation Training - Part 1

Hello all, once again. As mentioned from the previous blog post, I had started to learn from an Animator, Michael Morgan, who will be teaching my over the duration of 12 Weeks. What this then allows me, is to review the basics principles of animation again, where I was evidently lacking from my course at Uni, where hopefully this will give me a better chance of improving my showreel.

This week coming, it would be the fourth week and I was asked to animate a walk cycle. This was something which I had always needed in my showreel, as it would show the basic understanding of applying other basic principles together, i.e "squash and stretch". 

My tutor then sent me a few resources to help me, for this week assignment.

Richard Williams- Animation Survival Kit

Tutor - Resources

After many trial and errors and persistence of improving the walk cycle over and over again, going into the graph editor to make sure that all of the values looked correct, I was able to produce the walk cycle.

The only problem which I still encounter, is the "Pre infinity and Post Infinity cycle" as, yes it had made my character walk from A to B forever, but the tranlastion for the Z axis would for some reason slow down and therefore the poses would be lost, as it further progress on the timeline.

I had tried my best to amending this issue, where I had to re-do the poses, where I animated the character on one spot, rather than it having moving forward. This seemed to have solved most of the problem, but not all of it. (Some values must have not match up / mirrored to the opposite pose)

This was unfortunate and I'm still baffled as to why and how this is happening. It was early morning by the time I had pushed the limit of my knowledge and searched all over the internet as to why this was happening and any hope of fixing it.  So, hopefully when I ask my tutor on review day on Sunday, he will have a solution to this problem.  I'll see you next time guys.