Swing, pass, swing, pass. That's what walking's always been about. But for some reason I neglected this important animation skill for a long time, settling for just swinging legs and arms back and forth without any thought into placement. Finally, I'm making some effort to improve, but the process will be slow. I started by making walk cycles for Ratchet and Ultra Magnus. It was fairly easy, since both their personalities work well with animation. Ultra's regal and majestic, so he walks upright and moves kind of stiffly. Ratchet's younger in this series than he's usually portrayed, but he's still pretty old, so while he moves faster then Ultra, he also walks with a hunch. I also animated his backpack to bump up and down a bit while walking.
My sudden interest in making actual walk cycle animations came to be when I was looking at one of the new clips, and noticing how stiff and awful the walking was.
I also found a way to reduce loading speed for characters: Smart Folders. Basically, in Cheetah3D, you can import a character from an external file inside another one. And though that sounds just like importing, for some reason it takes less time.
More posts coming soon!
