Push

Push

I am today trying to create a push cycle, hopefully this video will help me a bit.

Walk Cycle 2

This walk cycle is far better than the other one mainly due to how i got a book called "The Animator's Survival Kit"
by Richard Williams this book talks through the different stages of a walk cycle and the motions that various parts of the body go through. The book makes a point of saying that no two people or characters walk the same and that the walk is determined by the character, for Robocop its quite obvious his character is quite proper and very rigid so this is how he should walk.


Here is the walk cycle i produced with some sound also.....

More Walking Videos

These videos are probably the two which best illustrates the style of walk which Robocop has. His arms cross over his body quite heavily due to the joint style which he has.

First attempt

This is my first try at doing a walk cycle, for this i am just going to have a quick try at setting the legs and arms up, for this i will be using the videos i have as reference and trying to get the movement correct.

Painting Skin Weights

Once i had bound the geometry to the joints i discovered that certain joints were effecting the geometry on other areas causing them to look deformed, for this i used the paint skin weight tool. To do this you open the tool and select the joints you then paint out the white areas which represent where the geometry is been affected.


To make sure that it has worked fully you then switch into the multi-color feedback mode which allows you to fully see all the areas which are affected.

Walk Cycle Videos

Here are some push test videos.

Walk Cycle

I found a website which talks you through basic walk cycle techniques.A walk cycle can be described by four distinct poses: CONTACT, RECOIL, PASSING and HIGH-POINT. This is a contact pose.

The feet are at their furthest extension in the walk. That is their most extreme position in the cycle. That alone makes this the most critical pose in the sequence.

This shows the keyframes of a walk cycle moving across the screen. The most important pose is the contact pose.

Rigging

This is the rig i have made, the hands are controllable through the attributes by changing the values the fingers move. There are leg and knee controls along with hip. There are also controls for the spine, the neck and the head along with the arms and elbows. The only issue i have is that the tutorial was for a soft bound one piece figure whereas my model is more robotic and rigid and it doesn't say how to attach the parts to it.

Hand

I created new attributes and used the set driven key tool to link the values with rotation meaning the hand is far more easily controllable.

Neck Controls

For this i had to add a few more joints as to make the neck move more properly. I then used the connection manager to link the rotations and parented the control to the collar joint.

I then applied the same methods to the head and parented the control to the top of the neck which allows the head to move independently but still connected to the neck.

Spine Control

I made a curve which i will use as a spine control, i snapped the centre point to the joint just above the spine. Then parented it to the central pelvis joint or root joint.

I then opened the connection editor to tell the computer that when the curve moves so should these certain points of the spine and linked the rotation factors together.

Arm Controls

Start by making a curve and snapping the centre point of it to the wrist, i then selected the control and the ik handle and then constrained these points. After this i selected the control and then wrist joint and oriented them.

I then created a cube and snapped it to the shoulder joint. Then selecting the control and the shoulder ik they are point constrained meaning they move around that point. I then parented this control to the central spine collar joint.

Knee Control

I made a sphere moved the centre pivot to the knee, i then changed the spheres attributes so as to make it invisible in the render. Then select the control and the ankle IK and constrain pole vector. This allows the kneecap to move with the control. After that i parented the knee control to the foot control allowing them to move together.

More Precise Controls-Foot

Selecting the foot control, i opened up the attribute editor. I made new attributes, ball_lift, foot_lift, toe_roll_z and toe_roll_y. I am then going to use the set driven key option, which allows you to make something happen through a value which i have added to the attributes.


I then used this option to set the control as the driver and the ball joint group as the driven.

This is quite complex linking the values to controls but i think this will make it easier when it comes to creating the walk cycle. It involved setting the rotation distance for the max and min perameters of the attributes i made allowing them to be used as controls.

Controllers

I am first going to create a curve and snap the pivot to the centre point of the ball of the foot. I then resized the curve to roughly match the foot, then i snapped the pivot to the ankle joint and shift selected the control and the left leg. After this i selected the constrain point and then constrain orient options which means when you move the control the leg moves appropriately.

IK Handles Arms

This is much the same as the legs but is much simpler this is due to how there are less joints, the hand uses forward kinetics so it will be done later on.

IK Handles Legs

Using the IK handle tool i made ik handles from the hip to the ankle, from the ankle to the ball joint and from the ball joint to the toe. I then renamed the ik handles to match the joint they were on.

I am now having to snap the pivots to the correct joints for the movement to work properly when i make controls later. in the tutorial it syas use the insert key which doesn't exist on a mac so you have to use the d key instead.

Orient Joint

I am now selecting all the joints through the outliner and then viewing the local rotation axis, this is to ensure that the xyz is aligned correctly. This is so when animating all the joint move in the same axis. As you can see all the axis face the same way as the local axis.



I then used the same tool for the arm but ticked the orient child joints tool which has aligned all the joint in the arm and hand for me which has saved a lot of bother.

Rigging

I started today with doing tutorials on rigging, after searching many different tutorial websites i found one which is very detailed and teaches all the basics. The tutorials are on the website www.swinburne.edu.au, i think they are some of the best i have seen they are all highly in depth and explain why you do things. I started by separating the model into a different layer then making it transparent, i then used the joints tool to layout the rough structure of the spine and one leg, after naming all the joints i used the mirror joints tool to make the right leg, this tool allows you to rename the Lft of all the joints to Rht in one click which is handy. The legs are then parented to the pelvis joint. I then did the same with the arms and they were parented to the collar joint.

More Reference Imagery

I found a website where someone has actually bought suits from both Robocop 1 and 2 to compare them and the different shapes between the first and second which is good because this imagery is really useful.