Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Project 7
Animate a Humanoid
Character
A very common, not so simple, and a very nifty exercise to do when learning to animate is
a walk cycle. A
walk
cycle
is very useful as it allows us to go through many of the aspects of
animaing a character, but it does not demand us to work on highly complex rigging setups.
Let's take the character that we created in the previous chapter, add to it the required
elements to be able to animate it, and create a basic walk cycle with it.
Mission Briefing
Staring with the model created in the modeling a basic humanoid character project, we
will be adding a basic armature with some simple coniguraion to make it useful for our
purpose.
With the armature properly set up, we'll perform three steps to create the inal animaion;
we'll start by creaing the key poses of the character, then adding the breakdown poses in
between, and finally adding a small tweak to improve the overall result. In the end, we'll
get a nice, basic walk cycle that we can later atach to a path to get it moving along it (not
included in this tutorial).
What Does It Do?
This project will guide us through creaing an armature from scratch, discussing along the
way some basic concepts related to rigging. After the armature is ready, we'll start working
on creaing an animaion, again from scratch, of a walk cycle for our character.
