I am going to start writing this so that I’ll at least have a draft so I can get it done at some point. I really want to write this as I’ve learned a lot from “re” animated Cron.
So I started out a bit unorganized doing a walk, reading an article, getting a run animation, reading some other stuff.. All of these are pretty straight forward, idle is pretty simple, no motion just posing pretty much. Walk is pretty simple, it looks just fine after posing and the same goes for jogging and running.
I decided pretty soon that I wanted to make use of root motion as I like the idea, and I also set up a 2D blend tree since I want Cron to handle quite exact and snappy I set up a tree with two degrees of turning for each movement state. This is where it started to get difficult.
First of all finding material on google on how you make a walk or run cycle is simple, finding one for turning is not as easy. I had a short chat with a great animator I know and got some ideas about the posing and expression. I tried first of all to wing it more or less. So I tried to turn it around as I animated a same-pace animation as the straight walk. I didn’t really get happy with it and I struggled with understanding how to work with actions, dope sheet and NLA.
I got some animations in and went back to fix something in a previous animation found something that broke in subsequent animations and so on. I realized that my first attempt, to wing it, would not work because I just went back and forward putting out fires.
I guess I had my epiphany when for no reason my turn walking animation turned up like this.
I realized: Being organized is key in animation. I really want that stated. I find it helpful to keep organized while modeling, writing code or making music as well, but when it comes to animation I feel like you soon will loose track if you aren’t.
What do I mean when I say organized? Basically I mean to keep conventions, pushing actions that are ready onto NLA clips. But also to keep it clean, following naming conventions and so on.
At this point I went back, removed unneeded stuff and actions, basically cleaned it up. I created actions for the clips I want to produce for basic locomotion and sat down to think about how to do turning animations.
For the turning animations I realized I wanted a guide as they felt uneven and random as I did them first. So the way I remade them now was for example doing walk I created a new action from the key-frames of walk. and created a circle to use as a reference. I continued to create two more circles, one for sharp turns and one for running. I ended up with this.
so now, when doing a left turn I will select the left turn circle and snap 3D-cursor to it. I then rotate the walk cycle around the 3D-cursor frame by frame with 4.5 degrees (I want to sample a 90 degree turn over 20 frames if you are interested in the maths). I then tweek it so that the feet works for the turn and also tweek the animation so that the head looks a bit more inwards and you tend to lean inwards when walking in a circle. For a sharp turn I do the same but the 3D-cursor in the center of the small circle and for run I make use of the big circle and so on.
You will have a relation to most of your keyframes, and if not that level you will for sure have that relation to your poses. Each control in your rig will have a set of key frames per animation, and scrubbing back and forth I would argue that you end up with a relation to all your key frames.
So you will gain a lot from keeping organized.
However, I still am at the stage where something suddenly doesn’t work any more. I have set up all my animations and am starting to tweak the feet and so on. And all of a sudden my head control starts acting up. I get this
There is no key-frame for the head when the bob occur, I have all other animation clips muted, I have checked other bones, I have deleted the key-frames and remade them, I have deleted the channel and remade it. I can see in the Graph editor that there seem to be something strange going on.
Anyhow that’s where I am at right now. phew! I am happy that I am having so much fun with it otherwise I might not have kept going. But I am and I will continue doing so!
I hope to get back with a post talking about the finished locomotion for Cron, or at least a finished draft through all of them!