walk with arms

Pulled the arms down and figured out (by pacing up and down the corridor) they move with the opposite leg - probably to balance up the body as the weight shifts from side to side.

walk_cycle 4

Continued with the previous animation with the hips moving, suppose its the same principle with the arm movement, coming from the shoulders instead. There is a small glitch at the start/end of the animation which i'll have to address, and also have to bring his arms down and have them swinging.

walk_3

Maya's gone and played its favorite trick again, so i've had to start again from scratch. Probably a good thing because i can re-attempt the whole cycle again, but with a greater element of control. Realised that the fundamental driver of the walk cycle is the hips, everything else follows it, so when i'm moving the legs and feet, it's all in relation to the hips. So this bit of animation is the movement up and down and side to side.

walk cycle 2

Managed to straighten out the previous moonwalk. Was following the walk cycle diagram a few posts prior, when i realised the feet positions correspond to the opposite legs after the contact frame (frame 13). This current walk cycle has no hip movement which is wht it looks a bit stiff/robotic. Once i've managed to get them swinging, i'll set about the arms/ head etc.

Walk cycle 1

Started experimenting with the walk cycle, chosen a 25 frame loop. As you can gather there's a huge glitch at the start because i've got the feet positioning wrong on the first frame and frame 25.

walk cycle - angry

Weight painting tutorial 4

weight painting tutorial 3

Watch 0803 Weights Pt3 in How to Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Weight painting tutorial 2

Watch 0802 Weights pt2 in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Weight painting tutorial

Watch 0801 Weights pt1 in How to Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Hand(trouble)

Just realised there's a bit of a problem with the right hand. God knows how it happened, but it appears that the 2nd joint of the middle finger is connected to the first joint of the first finger, which is all wrong. So...
After playing around with the joint editing tools under the skeleton menu, used the "disconnect" tool (first selecting the 2nd joint on finger 2). This disconnected the two fingers, so all that's left is to parent middle joint 02 to middle joint 01.

Planning for Rig

Issues to consider when planning a rig include:

The types of movement the character needs to perform
The look of the character
The body parts that need to move
Any specialised body parts.

Good planning allows the you to predict the characters needs before you get there, for instance a female action character will have different rigging needs than that of say a soft cartoon character.

Collar Control (Ctrl)

Started on the left collar control, relatively straight forward. Created a cube and switched off all the render settings. Selected the cube and the shoulder Ik and added a point constrain (Constrain menu, point).

Then created a group for the collar control and parented this to the joint at the base of the head, so when the joint moves, the control will move with it.

re-rooted hand control

Right, re-created the left hand handle, simple nurbs circle resized to roughly match the geometry and moved the pivot point to the wrist joint. Then selected the circle and the wrist IK handle in the hypergraph hierachy window and added a point constrain (Constrain menu - point). Now the circle controls the Ik handle.

Next thing is to add an orient constraint to the circle and the wrist joint (constrain, orient). Now the hand can rotate from the wrist using the nurbs circle to control it.

Previously the nurbs circle was jumping when i tried to apply the orient constrain. Man in the tutorial says this is bad. Indeed it was, but the extra wrist joint has seemed to have straightened all that out.

repositioned joints

Joints have now been repositioned in the correct location

re-positioning of the hand joint

Need to re-position the joints of the hand so they correspond to the geometry.

rigging hand

Finally managed to get the feet behaving like they should, using the set driven keys window and moved onto the hands. IK handle connects the shoulder joint to the wrist, but on second glance of the tutorials example I notice he has an extra joint in the hand. Not sure if this is going to be a major issue, but decided to use the "insert joint tool" (animation menu, skeleton, insert joint tool).
Seemed to have done the trick, apart from the hand moves in a really irregular fashion when you use the move tool - not good! Originally i thought it could be down to the local rotation axis not all pointing in the same direction, so checked that using the display menu. What i think has gone wrong is the placement of the IK handle. Because I've added a new wrist bone, the position of the IK handles destination has changed. So, to rectify this i'll delete it and re-attach in the correct position.

Muscle Contract

walk cycle - key positions

Image taken from the digital tutors series on animating a walk cycle. This still shows the key positions for a 25 frame walk cycle.