walk work flow(arms)

Whew, its been a lot of explaining to do for my first cycle in ages. Great refresher for me though!! Man I needed it.

Ok so the arms are pretty easy. All the rules from the pendulum exercise apply. Its just instead of one control we have 3. So all I do is rotate my arms down to my side, (remember this is a tough guy walk so the elbows need to be out like this guy has the largest lats in the world and cant bring em down more) so that pose is set. Now I go to side view. Frame 1 right foot forward means right arm back. Frame 17 means right arm forward, frame 33 same as 1.

Heres my curves for that arm. So I copy that animation, paste it onto my other arm, and paste it onto my lower arm. I know copy that animation on the lower arm, drag it where its posed nicely and scale it do a proper amount of movement, and I offset it by about 4 frames. I take that animation copy it to the wrist, and the other arms lower arm. I take my wrist and repeat the above steps.

I go over to my other arm now, copy paste that offset it by 16 frames, do that to lower arm, and wrist. And voila, almost done.

I now need to work the upper arm a bit on each arm. As the arm comes forward it sways out a bit. So I set that key on each arm passing pose, and I spline it, and it works nicely. Lastly as the arm comes out of the passing pose we tend to bring our body, so I rotate that in there as well. Repeat on the other arm, and your arms are finished. If you want to go with IK, well why use IK on a walk cycle when fk is so easy to do?