Animation Skills - 3D walk cycle and class exercises.

3D walk

Following on from the 2D walk animation exercise several weeks ago, we have now been tasked with doing a 3D walk animation in Maya. 

To facilitate this process we downloaded a pre-rigged 3D model to enable us to have the necessary rigging and character already set up. The walking cycle consisting of basically 4 distinct phases were studied and then starting from key frame one in the phase known as contact, the rigging handles were changed to position the model in the next phase known as the down phase at an appropriate key frame. This was again continued through the Pass phase and then the up phase, finally moving the model back to its original position for the contact phase with the opposite leg this time forwards having now completed half the walk cycle. The whole process of 4 phases is then repeated for the other leg to complete the full cycle.

The first exercise to explore physics and further animation in maya involved the use of nucleus objects. We took a sphere and a plane, attaching an nCloth to the plane and a passive collider on the sphere allowed simulation of a cloth falling very realistically.

The second exercise involved the use of rigidbodies to simulate physics interactions. A sphere and some cuboids were placed on a plane and all items were given rigidbodies to enable physics interaction between them. We provided the ball with some velocity and when it hits the cuboids it bounces off and knocks the cuboids over with the hit cuboids then falling over and hitting others which results in a chain reaction.

The third exercises involved the use of deformers to be able to bend, twist, squash and otherwise deform objects. We took several objects and applied nonlinear deformers to them.

The last exercise involved constraints to enable cameras or objects to follow a predetermined path and orientation. We created some cubes and cameras and allowed them to follow a path that we created with the use of curves.