Day 1

Ok so a not bad start to my animation beginnings.
Got comfortable working with Malcolm today and I did a walk cycle.
As I promised myself I would journal my workflow and my successes and my challenges with it.
So here's a video and explanation of step 1.

 Basically I set my timing to a ball. I was happy with the one ball, but I wasn't getting a sense of the spine, so I added another ball into the heirarchy so I could test out the rotations to get a feel of how it was going to look. Just in case anyone wants to know how I got the top ball to work like it is, I simply pressed insert and pulled its pivot point to the middle of the ball at the bottom.

I was happy at this point and had my timing worked out on the ball. The nice thing about Malcolm and my work flow, I created the ball pulled it up to his root, froze transformations and by copying the animation onto the root it moved perfectly! Yes I actually used the rotations and the translations on the ball directly on the root. 

walk front view

So here is the front view after adding the feet, the arms, the spine and the head.
Basically I did the feet together in the side view, offset them by 12 frames and worked the front view independently. The spine was easy after I did the ball, I used the animation on the root, I copied it up the spine and scaled it back and posed it in the curve editor in order to get the pose I wanted.
The arms I could be more happy with, but I got to this point in the time I gave myself and i'm not to angry. I did them in FK, I was wanting to break them on the way up as they passed the body, but went a little more conservative. I tried to create as much drag as I could while still having the arms move together, and not be rubber hosey.
The head I found a bit tricky to work with, as the orient to placement option on the head turned him into a walking no, and with it not on it was flying everywhere. So I turned it on, and I basically had to copy the chest Y rotations onto him, and invert them to get rid of that no head gesture. I had to play with it a bit to make it work from there, and I hope it's not too noticeable now.

Side View Of Walk

The side view was the first view I started in and it turned out nicely. When i'm doing a walk I always try and get a straight leg pose on the contact, looking at this video it almost doesn't read, I think there may be to big of a gap between the pose before the contact and the contact itself. If I do go back I would probly spend some time polishing these two poses and having that straight read better would be beneficial to the walk.
One thing I really liked about Malcolm that I would like to play with more, is the squash and stretch capabilities of the foot and the heel. I added a little, but when I do the run tmrw I am really going to try and push this. Perhaps each stride could have been a bit bigger as well.

To sum up, it was great to be back and doing some animating after so many years away. I am looking forward to tomorrow and can't wait to get to a run. Hoping I have time to start working on the mod so I can reference it on top of the animations I do!
But animation first and foremost.
If anyone out there is following this, I would love your feedback on my shots as I progress through my goals.

Perspective View of walk

Thanks in advance!

Matthew

PS- Just thought of adding this at the last second, this is a clip of the beginning playing over top of the actual walk. Kinda cool I think.