Pimp Walk

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Tue May 25, 2010 4:34 am

Hello,
I'm a unemployed 3D artist who hasn't done any serious animation in a long long time and when I did it was all very basic movement and I only worked on it for a week or so.

So now I'm giving myself a chance to see if I have potential or not.

Here is a basic standing idle to walk animation with a little flavor added.

Edit (new link)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M63H7OOGpUk

This took me a long time to get done, granted I had to re-learn animation and the program I'm still a little concerned that I'd be to slow to be considered for hiring. But I don't have a job anymore so I wanted to give myself a reasonable chance to see if I can do this or not.

Please be brutally honest in your feed back. I am willing to give this a chance but I have other things I could learn/do to add to my portfolio. so let me know if I'm wasting my time.

ps I got lots of good animation books to learn from, just need to know if other people think I have potential.

Durand · Post by **Durand** » Tue May 25, 2010 4:52 am

That's not bad at all . If the hips led the motion, that could have helped. The hair popped, and may be better if it bounced as a secondary motion. I don't think you are wasting your time.

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Tue May 25, 2010 5:07 am

Thank you Durand. I need to hear that.

I was considering moving the hips but got addicted to bones just swinging and not brave enough to simply use Translate. Is translate the best option or is there a good hip moving bone structure?

Here is what I currently have http://epicwalnut.com/animation/pimpbones.jpg

Durand · Post by **Durand** » Tue May 25, 2010 12:05 pm

Yes, you could use translate in the thigh bones to a degree. But, an extra bone in the hips may help with this as well. This is probably just being fussy. What you have done is fine. Walk cycles aren't the easiest things to do. Putting the character against a background will really show how well it all works.

GCharb · Post by **GCharb** » Tue May 25, 2010 1:17 pm

fracturedray wrote:Is translate the best option or is there a good hip moving bone structure?

I suggest you only use point motion for secondary actions like hips, easy to add fluctuation in the hip movement with it.

Walkcycles and facial animation are the hardest of animations.

I like what you done, very fluid, as Durand suggested, a bit of secondary motion, like the hair would give it more life, just do not get carried away.

G

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Tue May 25, 2010 8:00 pm

Durand, you made a good point about the hips so I did try to find a good solution. And I'm glad you mentioned it because it challenged me to figure it out and it also will help in the long run.

GCharb, The character is actually several png images put together so I don't have points to move. Is that what you mean or is there a way to draw an ellipse and attach the bone to it to slide along it at points?

I took a look at it and found that adding a hip bone that I could scale and rotate a bit may be the way to go. I'll do the same for the shoulders as well.

Thanks for the critiques and suggestions.

Durand · Post by **Durand** » Wed May 26, 2010 4:23 am

I've had a little re-think about this . Perhaps it is really just a matter of delaying the movement of the upperbody slightly so that the hips start to move first , then the leg, then the upper body. I don't know , I just feel that this will be in keeping with this type of character. So it may not require extra bones at all.

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Wed May 26, 2010 6:05 am

No worries Durand, it slowed me down adding the bones and tweaking everything but I liked the end results. I did lose a connection to the old animation but the whole point of this is to practice and see if I'm capable of doing this for a living. There's going to be plenty of redo's till I get the hang of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03fLRTt6b_8

Please let me know if it seems like he is moving to slow now. I'm not sure how I'll speed him up other than perhaps changing from 30fps to 35 or more. Dragging all the animation key frames over one frame makes him too fast.

Klay frog · Post by **Klay frog** » Wed May 26, 2010 6:34 am

I really love that character design. Great job on that.

I'm assuming you want to create an exaggerated pimp walk. Have you tried looking at references? From what I know, a stereotype pimp walk-- at least a funny looking one-- is pretty much just exaggerating every gesture. One of the craziest pimp walks that I can recall off the top of my head is from Futurama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI4de2PcgFQ

gleeful · Post by **gleeful** » Wed May 26, 2010 7:19 pm

Whoa! I LOVE the revised version of this character. Very nice.

Whatever you did in tweaking the more forward shift of the hips really integrated everything and made for a very believable character and walk.

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Wed May 26, 2010 7:45 pm

Thanks Klay and gleeful

I love Bender he rocks!!

Here is a snap image of the bones with the ones I added highlighted. I simply limited the rotation angles on them and scaled them as needed. Also scaled down the bone strength to nothing so they wouldn't distort anything.
http://epicwalnut.com/animation/pimpbones_new.jpg

Surprisingly doing it this way reduce need for me to tweak the feet every frame so it did not go below the normal ground level. the bone acted like a great shock system.

Now I have to hunt for info on action blending. For some reason blending a simple breathing animation to the walk is distorting the entire body instead of just the breathing bones that are the only thing moving in the breathe action. It there a way to make the action ignore the default pose and only look at the key framed bone movement/positions? Using 5.6 btw

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Fri May 28, 2010 1:32 am

I did some more basic animations with the pimp character. There is some popping because I didn't make the transitions yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7jbUcoMEJ8

I like most of the animations, except for the sad/slow walk, it seems like he is not putting any weight on the leg he is standing on.

If you have any feed back I welcome it.

Thanks

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 4:08 am

Added some more animations. He now has a silly walk, a run test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0WVTLmWK-E

GCharb · Post by **GCharb** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 2:00 pm

fractureday wrote:GCharb, The character is actually several png images put together so I don't have points to move. Is that what you mean or is there a way to draw an ellipse and attach the bone to it to slide along it at points?

Afraid not, with images you are a tad limited, cool walk anyway!

I like your latest attempt!

G

lwaxana · Post by **lwaxana** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 4:59 pm

Nice character and I love the limbering up animation and the hips forward walk!

I think the sad walk could benefit from more leg bending and more of a sense of weight, and poutiness. This montage of arrested development sad charlie brown walks might be helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oabcM9SOF-E One thing that could add some nuance is the tension in the body. In these clips, some of the characters still look tense, but the second one (George Michael) and the last one (GOB) are slightly more loose and tantrum-y. Using a tenser or looser walk will give a sense of the character's emotional state. Is he trying to hold it all together emotionally or has he resigned himself to his fate, albeit in a pouty way?

If you're developing walks for a show reel, I think walks with a lot of personality are great, but "Ministry of Silly Walks" style silly walks could be dangerous. The walk has to read strongly enough that it can't be mistaken for a regular walk that's not quite right.

I really like your work-flow of experimenting with different walks, finding ones that work well with the character, and then developing those more. I'll have to try this sometime! :D Really nice work!