Week 36: Run, Stop, Walk

Standard walking before I can run! Sooo i've gone back to basics and blocking out a standard walk cycle to get all the movements and weighting right - then I will use another animation layer and graph editor to add the exaggeration.

Here's what I started working on (for her creeping)...

There were too many issues - no weighting, no real follow through etc, so as I said i'm going back to creating a basic walk cycle, i'll then tweak this to make it look more how I want.

This is how the currently walk is shaping up - still a bit go (this is just getting the leg movements) but it's getting there! To be honest I always felt like the walk cycle would be a bit more complicated than the dance sequence... mainly because it has to be so right (if that makes sense), there's a hell of a lot that goes into walking (again if that makes sense), but I was really aiming for it to set me up well for when I do tackle the dance.

Huzzah, I have also (finally) learnt how to use the graph editor! Woop woop, it's already making tweaks a hell of a lot easier - and by keeping it open whilst i've been setting my keys means i've been able to see the effect these keys are having. Still trying to figure out the Tangents though...but getting there!

My approach to ZBrush has been the same (shame on me), but after some words of advice from Amit, i've completely gone back to the drawing board so to speak...I thought i'd learned my lesson really =/ obviously not lol. I'm going going to be doing an hour of ZBrush everyday courtesy of Digital Tutors.

I've found this year that I learn a lot quicker (and produce more) when I work in strict shorter chunks like this, and i'm hoping that by the start of next week (there's 42 lessons - aiming for 5-6 a day). So far its working - i've learnt far more about the interface in one day than I've learn in this last week - things are clicking slightly. To celebrate I (accidentally) made this weird bacteria gross green thing.

ENJOY

TV Paint is still on the cards for learning too as I think i'll prefer to 2D animate in this much more than flash as I can get more of a painterly style - but i'll only tackle this once i've got a firmer grasp on ZBrush.