For my walk cycle I was feeling a little more confident doing this one as I had previously done both a walk and run cycle in my undergrad. However I had done these both in Maya so I was using 3D models which are slightly different to the rigs in Toon Boom so I still had a few nervs walking into this animation.
Using Jammy for the pose-to-pose made me realise I wasn't a huge fan of that rig and the way it moved. I personally wanted to try to push myself to use something a little more complicated with more parts so I opted to use the Olive Rig which utilised the cut-out method with no master controllers. There are quite a lot of pieces to Olive which excited me as it would allow me to create more offset in my animations and give them more life compared to the Jammy rig.
After doing my pose-to-pose I realised I needed to work on my timing and spacing a lot more and definately utilise my references a bit better. For the walk I used a mixture of the Animators Survival kit and the walk-cycle tutorial created by Stylus Rumble who also used the Olive Rig. With the help of a video tutorial not only could I get a better sense of timing but also watch someone use the rig and learn how to use the correct nodes and options available in toon boom. I had a look at the Olive rig and came up with my own little personality for her and decided on wanting to make a really cartoony walk where her arms would have more extreme arcs than a walk based on realism. I also had a look at some of the walks used in The Sims 4 as they showed a lot of personality.
For timing of this walk cycle I took to referencing the Animators Survival kit. I looked at the section talking about the different beats of walk cycles and how many frames they run on. I settled for a walk on 12s as it seemed like to look like a brisk and confident walk on the Olive Rig, when watching the Style Rumble tutorial I seen hers was also on 12s which was a huge help too.
I started off like the previous animations with doing my key poses, breakdowns and then inbetweens. I opted to start my walk cycle on the contact positions then keyframed the Passing Pose in the middle. I then did my breakdowns of the down and up poses in between the Contacts and Passes followed by spacing them out to the correct frames to walk on 12s. Right here I didnt do any changes to heights, squashing or stretching, etc. I just wanted to get solid poses first before thinking about anything else in the model.
Key Poses
Breakdowns - No Timing
Fixing the Timing
From here I wanted to add some more weight and move her body more. I added the arcs to her body by pushing her up and down. I then focused on moving parts of the body more so tilting her shoulders as her arms swung and lifting and lowering her hips ever so slightly with each step. I also added a small bob to her head on the contact giving her a bit more life and personality to her stride.
Adding Movements to the Body
Once I was satisfied with this I wanted to add some offset to her body by changing the keyframes of the forearms and hands to get more of the arcing swing I was aiming for.
Offsetting the Arms
I was still thinking she was a bit stiff looking so I attempted to push her up and downs more and push the tilt of her body then also animate her hair swining back and forth. For the hair since its quite unpredictable I did a method of mixing pose-to-pose and straight ahead but mainly used straight ahead to seperate the strands and get rid of any stiffness. This was a bit of trial and error and found myself ruminating a lot on the hair trying to get it perfect but in the end I realised I didnt have a lot of time to do this so I did a quick shuffle around and settled on it. I tried pushing bob of her head down further and offsetting it slightly but im not too sure if its noticable.
Final Tweaks
Final Render
Reflections
I'm really happy with the way this walk cycle came out! I think it shows an upbeat personality to Olive and I really worked hard to try and utilise all the different animation techniques we've been taught. I do think there could be a bit more offset in different parts of her body and there are a few glitches that myself and Sarah noticed in the model, I would go back and fix these if I had more time. We also did a test where we switched the frame rate from 24 down to 22 in Toon Boom and noticed it seemed to eliminate some of the sticky glitches at the end. I wasn't sure if it was an issue with the way I rendered it out for looping but within Toon Boom switching the frame rate seemed to help a little. Fixing this and keeping it on 24 FPS is probably something a little more tedious like moving around some frames or repositioning some parts of the model which again I would do if I had time but for the means of practicing I'm happy to submit it the way it is.
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