walk workflow(doing feet)

Ok. So I have my reference gathered. I know my timing, I know my poses. I know what I want this walk to look like, and move like. Its all there. Now how do I do it??

Here's my workflow I was taught some of this in school, some of this I have adapted. Pretty much everything on the body has already been covered by earlier tutorials. The figure 8 of the root control. The pendulum of the arms. The movement of the feet. Its all been covered its just practically applying the basics we did with the sphere.

So the first thing I like to do is the root control. For now just the up and down of the root. So I know a walk cycle needs two up and downs. My reference will tell me how much later the weight come downs after the foot contacts the ground. Heres what my graph editor looks like for that.

Some things to notice.

1. There is two ups and downs(1 for each step)

2. The first down comes on frame 3, 2 frames after the foot has contacted.

3.There is a key inbetween each extreme to control the tempo.

Next thing I do is my feet extremes. So frame 1 17 and 33. Frame 1 and 33 are the same. Frame 17 is the push off. I like to do this a little different than most ppl though. Since efficiency is so important in animation I like to do both feet at the same time and offset them later.

One very important thing to remember is that when the foot is coming backward the curves are in linear! Very important so when the walk is projected forward there is no slipping in it. Here are the curves for the feet after the timing has been worked out. On the poses established.

The red line is the feet coming forward and back(you can identify the back by the long straight line with no keys along the way) The black curves are for the foot roll. This rig is unique in a few ways from some other rigs. It has the the toe roll built in to the foot roll, so once you go past a certain value the toe roll kicks in. So ill explain a lot of things here as this kinda is a bit tricky.

The foot for one does not start coming forward yet on frame 17 like you would assume. The knee at this frame stops moving backwards, and starts moving forward. If you look at our reference on pg 109 of the survival kit, the foot starts coming forward on frame 5 which is actually frame 21 of our cycle. I find in cg not to hold it back for so long as you will start having a ton of pops to deal with, so I bring it forward on frame 19. Now notice the foot roll peaks on frame 19, but it doesn't start coming back quite yet. This is important because the ankle needs to lead the foot forward not the foot!! With this particular rig, you cant build a nice pose with just that control for the push off, I needed to grab the toe control build the nice pose you see in the book for the passing pose. Lots to cover and that control is pretty easy to figure out without me explaining it.

So thats most of the work done for the feet(in the side viewport anyways) We now need to go in there and polish the knees up. A knee should go forward and not stick in the same place for 2 or 3 frames. It should come backward and not pop forward on a frame ever. If it does either of these things its bad. Usually you can fix this with the footroll control. What I like to do is zoom in to the knee, and look at it, sometimes you get lucky and it all works fine other times it doesnt. So if it is popping or sticking, open the graph editor, set a key before the pop, Shift I mmb on the frame before. And shift i mmb on the frame of, pull that key till the knee has progressed enough forward and backward to not pop, check your next frame repeat till no pops. Sometimes on the foot roll, Ill have keys for every frame :S

Next front view port. What needs to happen? The foot contacts the ground on the pinky toe and rolls onto the big toe. (This coincendentally is why wcb pays more when you lose your pinky toe and not your big toe, Dont ask me why I know this, and yes I have all my toes.) So grab whatever control lets you do this, if you dont have one you can rotate the foot.So go to frame 1 and rotate the toe out to land on the pinky toe, and have it settle back to straight come frame 4 or 5. After the foot leaves the ground and starts coming forward have it slowly coming back to the values you gave it on frame 1. Now you need have the foot not move in a straight line coming forward. So first off check your reference and find out where you want the foot in the pose. Now when the foot starts coming forward have start moving out to the point you need it to be on the passing pose, and bring it back to where your initial pose was on the contact frame. Pretty simple. With that done we now need to offset the feet. Coincidentally these last two steps have to be done 1 foot at a time. So open up a foot, and you will see all that animation. Add a key on the second frame and second to last frame, you can grab all shift i mmb or press s on the time slider on these frames. I like to do it the graph editor way. Now grab all your curves. go to the last frame, and press ctrl c ctrl v. You now have two sets of that animation. Now grab it all and drag it back to frame -16 or whatever makes it look right. You can tell by clicking on frame 1 17 and 33. You should see no movement at all on these frames. Thats it. Your feet are done.

You may need to go back and rework the feet a bit after we start things on the hips, but very minimally.