3D walk animations

[Rasheed]

I was thinking of doing some 3D walk and run animations, based on Richard Williams' book. Here is the basic idea:



I want to recreate some of the walks in the book, and perhaps invent some of my own. At least, I have a reasonable rig, which I only have to tweak a little bit more. The body needs to be able to lean forward.

Once I've done that, I will share the .anme file, so some of you animation newbies can try some walk cycles of your own. I think it can be a lot of fun trying different stick figures (male/female/child) and even more-legged creatures.

Of course, part of the fun is showing the locomotion inside a rotating cube.

Edit: Here is a better rig. The torso is bent forwards, and the arms move in a slightly other plane than the legs.



As promised, here is the rig. I've put the parts of the body in different layers, at a 3D angle. I put the center of these layers in the joints of the stickman character, so you can use layer rotation and translation to change their orientation in three dimensions.

• cube.anme.zip

Have fun animating!

[synthsin75]

Wow, nice rig. Have you tried it with a more fleshed out character with camera facing limbs? Or does camera facing only revolve around the y-axis?

[Rasheed]

No, I haven't done that. I think that it is easier to trace the animation in a 2D vector layer.

I also think this is a good learning/testing tool, to check if your animation looks good from all sides.

[1999]

Look's dam good. .Good idea,light's on up stair's It might walk across the screen .

[DarthFurby]

Nice rig. Looks like a great way to practice walk cycles.

[Rasheed]

Mind you, the rig is still rather crude. You may want to modify it if you need to do some really elaborate walk animation, where you want to involve the hips and shoulders rotating through bones.

So, adjust the rig if there is a need to do so. The main idea was to use 3D rotation to let you study the walk cycle from all sides. You could also use the cube to make the character make a sharp turn, or walk against a slope. The idea is that you start directing your character to act a certain way, with mere animation.

It involves no drawing, only timing and spacing.

[Rasheed]

I've made the file more useful, by adding a floor grid and measuring tapes along the axes, and by organizing the layers in group layers.



You can find the new file here:

• cube-a.anme.zip

I also made a standard walk cycle with it, using the main bone in the Stickman layer to move the Stickman up and down, 3D layer translation, to move him in the correct position on the grid, and rotate bones on the legs and arms child bone layers. I animated a double-step this way, and afterwards removed the layer translation of the Stickman layer, to have him walk in place.



This is a much more reliable method of character animation than letting him walk in the same position while you manipulating the arms and legs. It takes more work to do it this way, but the result is so much more satisfying.

BTW I used 24 frames per double-step, instead of 16 frames per double-step (animating at 24 fps, of course), as I did before. Just changing timing gives a whole other feel to the result.

[DarthFurby]

I really like that the stick figure is in 3d space, which I think ultimately helps people visualize things in 2d space. I did some really crude 3d head models a long time ago and that experience really helped when I started practicing 2d head turns.

[animationkolhapur]

Thats a fantastic piece of work Brother .. ."The Great Rasheed has struck again " ... getting too anxious to see the whole thing working on a proper character RIG .. Way to go Rasheed .. great work.,.,. Keep it up

[realsnake]

brilliant...

[heyvern]

I was just thinking this might be worth revisiting my bone master/slave scripts. With it you could animate the whole figure from one bone layer at the top of the layer palette.

With that in place you could create actions of different types of walks. If I ever figure out how to "blend" bone rotations maybe some kind of walk style generator could be created.

I think this is a great tool for doing walk cycles.

-vern

[Rasheed]

I was just thinking this might be worth revisiting my bone master/slave scripts. With it you could animate the whole figure from one bone layer at the top of the layer palette.

No, that doesn't really help, because:

• my rig is 3D, while a master bone layer is 2D (for example, if you want to rotate the hips, in 3D you do this with bone rotation, in 2D you do this with bone scaling)
• I use bone constraints, which aren't incorporated in the bone master/slave scripts (if a bone angle is constraint by a second bone's angle, the first bone's angle remains the same, although it rotates in sync with the second bone)

I think I'd rather have all bone tools punch through the layer hierarchy and select the bone that the mouse cursor is hovering over while the left mouse button is clicked with the Alt key down, and selects the bone and the layer it is in. The current Alt modifier isn't powerful enough if you have multi-layered bone rigs.

I'm not sure if those tools already exist, but if they do, please tell me where I can download them.

[heyvern]

Correct me if I'm wrong but all the bone motion is done using standard bone rotation. I looked at the keys of your arm, legs, etc bone layers and only the bones are being rotated. I didn't see any keys for layer rotation on those layers.

My bone slave script would only rotate the bones but you wouldn't need to be on that layer. It is just like constraints but can control bones on any layer in the whole project. No bone scaling to simulate 3D, just rotation like you are doing now. You could rotate all the bones from one master bone layer (like you said, being able to select bones on separate layers).

The layer rotation wouldn't even be taken into account... unless of course you want that as well which could be done using other bones on the "master" layer. For instance master bones that control the layer rotations for the "3D" effect (you would need one bone for each layer rotation axis). Basically bones would take control of the layer rotation tools.

When it's all done... you could control the whole thing from one layer.

My thought would be to have a "pseudo" 3/4 view skeleton layout for the "Master" bone layer so you can see what is happening... but the ultimate result would be the bones in the actual walking skeleton.

-vern

[Rasheed]

This is my problem:



The torso and head turn in the YZ plane, the hips and shoulders turn in the XZ plane, and the arms and legs turn in the plane perpendicular to the shoulders and hips axes, respectively. I find that hard to control with a 2d rig. I've tried, but it was much easier to control the bones directly in the separate (child) bone layers.

I also have the right shoulder constraint by the left shoulder, and the right hip constraint by the left hip. If I rotate the left shoulder in the master bone layer, it doesn't turn in the corresponding left and right shoulders in the control bone layer. I have to remove the bone constraint on both master and control bones, for the master bone to retake control. I've tested it thoroughly, with the master bone layer as the lowest layer in the layer hierarchy.

[heyvern]

I think there is a tiny bit of confusion.

My scripts don't use the built in constraints of AS. It is "custom" script that merely transfers rotations from a master layer with bones to named bones anywhere in the file.

Those opposing rotations could easily be incorporated. Plus it wouldn't matter what the master layer rotations looked like because you would see the results in the actually walking character.

I'll dig up my old scripts and dummy up a sample.

-vern