In this post, I am going to talk about the mood change walk and animal walk cycle exercises, which probably contend with each other as the most complicated animation exercise that I have done yet.
The first exercise was the mood change exercise. We were asked to create a walking character that reacted to something which prompted the character to walk with a different mood. We all started with learning the basic walk cycle and the keyframes. After that, we shot some footage for our reference and then work on the exercise. For my mood change walk, I decided to do the mood changing from happy to sad. I would say that for the happy walk, it was easier to spot the keyframes from the reference footage because the movement was bigger and clearer than the sad walk. I also notice that in my animation there is still something that makes the movement looks odd, especially when and after the mood changes, so I would have to go through the frames again and try to improve the animation.
The next exercise was the animal walk cycle. In this exercise, we were given a day to observe and do life drawing of dogs to understand more about how they move and how they are built anatomically. I found this exercise very exciting but also quite complicated. I would say that I struggled the most in creating the right timing of the walk, and to be honest I still don’t know whether my animation could pass as the right dog walk cycle. I started with a walk cycle that I created based on a “standard” keyframing that I found in an animation book. After that, I tried to create another version based on real dog video footage. I found that even though the walk cycle that I do based on the book felt more even, the one that I did based on the video reference does feel more natural. Though I noticed that there is a slight limp in my animated dog, so I would have to go through each frame again to improve my walk cycle.