Maya Lesson - Animated Walk and Car Rig

    Animated Walk Cycle

   This tutorial focused on making an animated walk cycle. Having a pre-made model and rig, our main focus was understanding how to get a good animated walk, the use of the graph editor and understanding keyframes.

  Firstly, we worked on the root (main body) of the model, adding a sway for the hips at the highest points and an weighted element to the movement. We then went onto the legs, working from the contact of the heels at the beginning and end of the cycle, then working inwards. Finally, we worked on the antennae, to give its own form of offset animation (Secondary). The graph editor help reduce the slide in the motion placing some curves to be linear (shark-fins), and placing keyframes at 1, 13 and 25 for our extrememes.

Once all the animation is correct, we wanted our robot to walk across the screen. To mark out the length in stride, we used two cubes on frame one (when the heels had the widest contact to the floor), and overlapped them. We then keyframed the Translate Z to the boxes in time with our steps. The graph editor was then placed onto infinity timing pre and post loop, and the time line changed to 200 frames. This allows the robot to keep walking right to the end of the timeline.

This was a really interesting tutorial, but I feel I may have to revisit it at some point just make sure I've grasped it well.

      Car Rig Animation

 Similar to the lego car tutorial we did some time back, the focus of this was to give our little speeding car life and attitude.

   This one was set over 50 frame at 25X1. Frame 1 we wanted the car to be rearing up to show it speeding, around shot 7 the skid and side roll start to come into play. The tyres face inwards into the car body, the rear of the car lifts in the skid and come down on frame 30 post skid. This secondary animation is to help to give a little more personality to the animation.