Walking cycle is one of the basic movements in character animation, but also one of the most difficult movements. Making walking loops is an essential exercise for any animator. So for three weeks, from week 6 to week 8, we trained on 3D animation of the character walking cycles.

In the walking cycle, the actions in a cycle can be divided into four states, namely contact, down, passing and up. From the side view, the figure’s center of gravity moves up and down in a sinusoidal manner.

plan of walking cycle

Here is a blocking animation of walking cycle that I made in week 6.

This is the spline animation based on the blocking version in week 7, but there are obvious problems, for example the function of parameter TransZ does not fit into a straight line resulting in a kind of “twitch” of the object’s displacement in the Z direction.

The gif shows the version submitted in Week 8. There are still many details that need to be further improved, and I will solve them gradually in the future training.

In almost all basic action animations such as walking, running, and jumping, the shift of the character’s weight is a factor that cannot be ignored. Therefore, before conducting formal walking training, we need to understand the law of the character’s weight shift.

As shown in the figure, the lateral step movement can be divided into 4 parts: start, up ,contact, squash & pass. These 4 consecutive movements constitute a complete centre of gravity transfer process.

From this perspective, the ups and downs of the weight in the stride action are basically the same as in the walking action, and the four states from a motion trajectory similar to a sine curve.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/Zjk1ZGM4OGM0/

Attached my Syncsketch work link.

By combining the bouncing ball and pendulum animation mentioned in previous two chapters, we can get the animation of the ball with the tail in this chapter. This kind of model is also the movement mode of many creatures in nature, such as squirrels, foxes and other creatures with large tails meet the similar movement law of the ball with the tail when they bounce and run.

Taking the video of a squirrel jumping as an example, the trajectory of its tail following its body is very representative, so animators abstracted it as a geometric model of a “ball with a tail”, as shown in the following video, which animates the characteristics of the movement of this form of ball.

On the basis of this animation, in the third week, I made a blocking version of the ball animation with the tail, but the trajectory of the tail is not complete, ignoring the “S” shape, “C” shape curve, etc., which has been made in the pendulum animation, the following homework link.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/MTg3ZTdhNTk5/

In the assignment of the fourth week, I modified the animation after the revision of the class assignment in the third week. The following is the link of the assignment.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/MmU0M2Q3Njhk/

As an important component of basic animation principle, pendulum animation is an indispensable part of basic animation training. As a classical model in physics, its motion principle has been well quantified, so it can be easily explained from video resources on the Internet.

In the above video, the characteristics and principles of pendulum motion are well analyzed from the perspective of physics, and the detailed physical phenomena are started to provide a theoretical basis for the production of pendulum animation.

The following Maya tutorial explains in 3D software what needs to be considered in the actual animation process from the perspective of animation, which is very inspiring to me. Here is a link to my assignment after it was uploaded to syncsketch.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/YzQ5ZjFmZDNm/

Detailed analysis is the cornerstone of good animation success. This blog post is about the important role of Planning before the animation and the details that determine the animation.

In the case of pinball, for example, it is important to look for references during the animation creation process. References can be videos, pictures, or observations of real-world physical phenomena. It is only based on real physical phenomena that you can create vivid animations.

Above is a plan I made based on the video.

Here is a screenshot of the final exercise, with a Syncsketch link below for the full exercise.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/NDc3NjA1NDJh/