Character Animation

Many of my character dont have a need for a walk cycle beacause they have wheels or balls which allow them to roll along. However the Main character has a fully rigged skeleton and the animation wouldnt look very good if he just slid everywhere. This therefore meant that i needed a walk cycle for this character.

Initially, i had no idea how to do a porper walk cycle that doesnt look like the character is lifting its feet into the air. Therefore i checked on youtube and found a video by youtube user Game Dev Academy who has an excellent video about the creation of a walk cycle.

After follwign this video i was able to create a walk cycle for my main character. While it doesnt look the best, i am mostly happy with how it turned out. However, this walk cycle doesnt look that good on the character because of how the character was designed which is entirely my fault. The walk cycle sort of looks like the character is shuffling along the ground.

The animiation for the main character was handled within 24 frames. The first frame of this cycle was the character moving their right leg forward, the middle part or fram 12, was the right leg moving backward and the right leg starting to move forward and the final frame of the animation was moving the left  leg to the back again and the right leg froward again. The first frame and last frame of a walk cycle need to be the same otherwise there would be a break to the cycle and and wouldnt loop correctly.

Scene 4 Storyboard

Scne 4 takes place just after scene 3 and involves the duo taking an elevator down into the bar and talking to the bartender to gain information. The scene starts with the duo in the elveator. The duo then leave the elevator and approach the bar and talk to the bartender. The bartender asks whether he can get them anything. The main character responds with questions about the mafia. At this point the bartender is revealed to be a mafia spy and then starts to open fire with his laser pistol. The duo hide behind a table and return fire. Vendo then launches a can of Energy Oil at the bartender which incapacitates him.

Main Character Model

To create the main character model, i imported the sketch of the main character as an image. After i then created a cube which i added multiple extra edge loops. This then allwoed me to extrude these extra facs to create the arms, legs and head.

Once this was done, i added the colours to the character and then tried to give the character a skeleton

Once the character had a skeleton, i needed to paint weights. This process involves defining where each joint on the character effects which area. By default, moving certain joints will also manipulate surrounding areas of skin. This is where the skin weight tool come in handy.

 

The image above is the view when using the skin weight tool. In the image, the left leg joint is selected and the white area shows where this joint manipulates. The goal is to make surroundiong areas that wouldnt be affected by the left leg, such as the right leg, black. Once this is done, the character is mostly fit for animation.