In this Maya tutorial we will cover the process of creating a Walk Cycle in Maya. One step at a time, we'll break down the body mechanics of a walk. We'll learn the main positions that one goes through in a walk, we'll learn how to create seamless cycles and explore ways we can add convincing follow-through and weight. We'll even work with animation layers to produce a walk that is natural and has a little personality. Software required: Maya 2010 and up.
Pluralsight – Animating a Walk Cycle in Maya
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A walk cycle is a series of animations that loops infinitely to create the illusion of a character taking steps. Walk cycles are something that every animator needs to know because they are used in everything from video games to commercials and film.
The up position (or, falling point of the walk) is the last of the four main positions you need to know when learning how to animate a walk cycle. The character is now at the highest point of the walk so the leg is swinging forward as it prepares to plant the foot on the ground.
Create convincing walk cycles and easily learn time-saving animation techniques in Maya. Please note that the project files provided with this training kit require Maya 7 to be opened. Software required: Maya 4.0 and higher (project files require Maya 7).
Create convincing walk cycles and easily learn time-saving animation techniques in Maya. Contains over 2.5 hours of project-based training. Perfect for beginner to intermediate users. Popular highlights include: Walk Cycle Diagram; Layering Body Mechanics; Follow Through and Weight; MEL Scripting for Animators; Transforming Male Walk into Female Walk; Translating Walk Cycle Forward; Keying in Channel Box; Graph Editor; Insert Key Tool; Breaking Tangents to Create the Illusion of Weight; Editing Tangents for Seamless Cycling; Cycling with Pre and Post Infinity; Please note that the project files provided with this training kit require Maya 7 to be opened. If you do not have Maya 7, you can create your own character rig with the help of our Character Setup in Maya training kit. Software required: Maya 4.0 and higher (project files require Maya 7).
Discover the creation and mirroring of the four basic walk poses and shows several different and unique techniques for refining and expanding the cycle into keyframed animation. Software required: Autodesk Maya 2017.
Have you ever needed a walk cycle for your animation in Maya? If so then this course is for you. In this course, Building Walk Cycles in Maya 2017, you'll cover walk cycle creation from gathering references to final translation of cycled animation into forward motion. First, you'll begin by learning good sources of reference material and how to create and mirror the four basic poses of a walk. Next, you'll then jump in and learn varying poses and timing to give your walk cycles different flavors. Then, you'll discover how to refine those poses and timings using the graph editor. Finally, you'll explore time-saving baking techniques for converting cycled animation to keyframed movement. By the end of this course, you'll have learned a set of fairly sophisticated techniques for creating walks that you can apply to your own characters, animations, and productions. Software required: Autodesk Maya 2017.
About the course: To learn the human body mechanics of a walk cycle specifically, see this course from Kurt Jones. You'll start by breaking the walk cycle into small bits, see how to set up the positions and connect them, learn what details to add for believable movements and complete the cycle seamlessly. Everything will be done in Modo, so you'll additionally get a chance to learn its powerful graph editor used for adjustments.
In this course, Game Character Animation in Maya and Unity, you will learn the foundations of creating great game animation inside of Maya. First, you will learn the importance of breaking down and understanding a character rig. After that, you'll dive into the animation process, by creating a walk cycle, an important staple in nearly all games. Through the process of establishing and defining the key poses of the walk cycle, you will take that same skillset into creating a run cycle. Finally, you'll learn how to animate an idle, utilizing a more straight-ahead or layered approach. With all the animations created you'll wrap up the course by exporting and implementing the animations into Unity. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills and confidence to create your own game animations in Maya and Unity.
There is a lot that goes into creating a believable walk cycle, you need to understand how the human body moves, and the key positions we go through during a walk. Walk cycles are a key component in video game animation, if a character is going to move they are going to need to have a walk cycle. The walk cycle is often one of the first animation tests done for a new character in a film because it's a great way to get comfortable with the rig as well as establish a personality. In this article, I'm going to walk you through the key steps of creating a walk cycle inside of Blender. If you're brand new to character animation inside of Blender I recommend first checkout out Learning the Basics of Blender Animation Tools article. Before you begin animating a walk, you need to know the basic formula. That's right, when it comes to walk cycles there is actually a good formula that will help you create a believable walk cycle every time. Of course, this formula is really for a very basic walk, the type of walk you see when someone is walking down the street, or strolling through the mall. There are four main poses and an average of 12 frames per step, so 24 frames for a complete cycle. You can see in the image above the main poses involved with a walk cycle, these poses are going to give you the foundation for a great walk. Of course, the poses can be tweaked and exaggerated where needed, but you can see the motion that the body goes through during a walk. In the animation world this type of walk cycle is often referred to as the "Vanilla Walk". Since we are going to be animating a vanilla walk cycle, our posing will not deviate very far from this basic structure. After a quick Google search for "Walk Cycle" you'll be presented with a large list of images displaying the main poses and timing involved. However, it's still beneficial to either find video reference online, or even get up and shoot some of your own. Make a mental note of the motion your body goes through during the walk, and really study the reference to learn how the weight transitions from side to side and the rotation of the hips and upper body. The more planning that you do beforehand will only benefit the quality of your walk cycle.
The rig we are going to use is the classic DT Puppet, which is an excellent body mechanics rig. You can download the Blender file here: DT_Puppet_Rig. With any walk that you create, the first thing you'll need to establish is the contact position. For a 24-frame walk cycle there is going to be a total of three contact positions.
Look at the images above you can see the next major key pose for a walk cycle is the down position, this is when the body is at its lowest, and the weight has begun to shift over the supporting leg. The back foot is starting to raise up and really peel off the ground. However, at the down position, you don't want the back foot to be off the ground yet, keep the front toes still planted, and the heel of the foot raised up. You want to create this pose on frame 4, and on frame 16.
The last key pose you need to create is the up position; this is actually when the body is at its highest position. Your instinct when creating your first walk cycle may be to have the contact be the position when the hips are the highest, but that isn't actually the case. The up position is typically slightly higher than the contact, because the body is starting its descent on the contact position.
The Up position should be created on frame 10 and frame 22. Now that you have all the main poses established, you should now have a walk cycle that is moving in a believable way! Just by created these four main key poses it gives you the foundation of a solid walk. All that's left to do now is fine-tune the walk animation and start to add that final polish.
You can see the final walk animation above. A walk cycle can seem like a daunting animation to tackle, but if you've done the proper planning, studied the four main poses involved, and timed it out correctly a walk cycle is actually one of the simpler animations to achieve. Now, this was just a very basic "vanilla walk' you can experiment with the timing as well as the poses to try and add more of a personality to the walk.
This course will walk you through every step of creating a drone spaceship, from the ground up. You'll cover the fundamentals of navigating and modeling in Blender, along with texturing, rigging, animating, lighting, and rendering.
For my project, I wanted to learn how to create fur in Maya. I decided to make a model of a male lion to add fur to because I thought a lion would give me experience with fur that isn't uniform in length, due to the lion's large mane. I decided to use XGen for the fur because I read online that it was easier to groom and shape than nHair. I also decided that the hair wouldn't be dynamic, so I could have more time focusing on getting it to look the way I wanted it to without worrying about the extra component of making it dynamic. After creating the lion model, I watch the Pluralsight tutorial, "Creating Dynamic Fur with XGen in Maya" by Peter Gend. I tried my best to follow along with the tutorial, first creating an XGen description and choosing groomable splines. I then adjusted the density, using 250 density for the actual splines and 50 for the guide hairs so they would be easier to use. I tried creating a density map like the tutorial did. The density map indicates where fur should appear on the model, with white indicating fur and black indicating no fur. I tried to make the eyes and nose black, but fur still appeared there anyway. Eventually I learned that I could just use the length brush to minimize the fur in those areas so they were invisible, although some hair still appears around the eyes. I also changed the width ramp so the hair would taper at the ends so it looked more realistic. I used the length brush to make the hair on the face shorter and the hair in the mane and at the end of the tail longer. I used the pose brush the groom the fur so it wasn't sticking straight up. The most challenging part of this assignment was getting the fur to be the correct color. Lions do not have a uniform color fur across their bodies. The mane and the end of their tail is usually darker than the rest of its fur, and they usually have a white patch of fur on their chin and around their eyes. Ideally, I would accomplish this by using UV mapping, but I am not very familiar with UV mapping and did not have time. Instead, I created a lambert material and used a ramp for the color, so that the area that's roughly around the mane would have a darker color and the face a white color. While this appeared on the mesh as I expected it to, the fur did not correspond to the mesh color as I assumed it would. When I applied the ramp shader to the fur, it had the ramp appear on each individual hair as opposed to the color corresponding to the color on that part of the mesh. I could not find a solution in time, so instead the fur is all the same color. I used a Hair Physical Shader that was created when I created the XGen splines for the fur color instead. I used a black lambert material for the nose and an orange and black ramp material for the eyes. I used the Arnold Shader for rendering as the other renderers don't work with XGen. Link to Maya file Project 3 For this project, I created a rig for the unicycle model and animated it. For the rig, I created a joint for the entire unicycle, as well as one for the seat, one for the metal bars of the unicycle, one for the wheel, one for the seat, and one for each pedal. For the environment, I created a polygon primative cube, scaled it up, and then deleted the top face as well as one of the side faces. I decided to use the Arnold Render for this project, so I used the aiStandardSurface material for all of the objects. I chose the Arnold Render because I wanted to get more experience using it, but also because I wanted to use the standard shader for the unicyle bars due to the "metalness" atribute, which makes creating a metal texture much easier than it would be if I had used Blinn or Phong material. For the camera, I used camera and aim, and set the aim to be the unicycle. For the animation, I animated the unicycle to jump and flip. I used the principle of anticipation by having the unicycle back up slightly before it jumps and flips. I also used squash and stretch, scaling the tire so it would stretch as it jumped in the air, and squash when it landed, before returning the tire to its normal shape. The unicycle also moves in arcs when it jumps as well as when it turns around in the scene. Link to Maya file Link to animation Exercise 14: Pluralsight Animation Tutorial For this exercise, I watched the course "12 Principles of Animation in Maya" on Pluralsight. In the "Spacing" tutorial, I learned about buffer curves. By using the graph editor, I learned I could select curves and press the button "Insert Buffer Curve." This creates a ghosted version of how the curve looked when insert buffer curve was clicked, and it can be seen if the user creates key frames or otherwise alters the curve in the graph editor. I also learned that the "Swap Buffer Curve" button allows users to toggle back and forth between the original buffer curve and the one they changed after the buffer curve was created. Something that stood out to me was how squash and stretch was described in the lesson "Inertia, Flexibility and Articulation." I usually thought of squash and stretch as altering the mass of an object, but the instructor of the lesson pointed out that for more complex objects, one could use squash and stretch by altering the distance between components of an object, as opposed to altering the mass of the components itself. One thing I've wondered about with squash and stretch was how to use it without looking very cartoony, and the lesson explained a method for apply squash and stretch in more realistic manner. This idea was implemented in the tutorial "Squash and Stretch." The instructor used a rig that had a bone for each component of the larger object (a sphere mesh, and two cube meshes), as well as a bone inbetween each mesh component. He implemented squash and stretch by keyframing the position of the bones in between the meshes, making them farther apart for stretching and closer together for squashing. Exercise 13: Stylized Walk Cycle For this exercise, I had to make a stylized walk cycle. I decided to make a nervous/anxious walk style, with the character holding themselves and looking around. Playblasts: Link to walk cycle (front) Link to walk cycle (side view) Exercise 11 For this exercise, I watched the movie The Little Prince and identified three examples of the 12 principles of animation. 1. Appeal The main character in the movie has large eyes to make the character look appealing. 2. Arcs Link to video In the movie, the plane flies in a circle around the glass with stars in it. 3. Moving Hold Link to video The fox's tail moves up an down when he is talking, as well as when he's standing still. Project 2: Recreate a Scene For this project I had to recreate a picture by modeling the objects in it and adding shaders and lighting. I picked a picture of chess pieces on a chessboard. The original image 2ff7e9595c
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