There are 5 key poses to block out at the start: down, passing, up, and contact positions. The down and up positions are key for giving the character a sense of weight and mass.
Getting the hips and shoulders rotating along with the legs are important for portraying balance in the walk. As I'm animating a cartoony character, I plan to emphasise these rotations to give him more personality.
I decided from the start that I wanted to give my character a powerful, dominating walk cycle as he's supposed to be either a villain or an anti-hero. Whilst searching for 'powerful walk' on Pinterest for reference images, I was bombarded with images of power-walkers (of course). Even though this wasn't what I was searching for, I noticed that the way the elbows stay bent with each stride actually made them look more powerful and determined. I also found an online walk cycle tutorial by Dermot O Connor where he creates a 2D walk cycle which is somewhat similar to the one I want to create.
When starting my own animation, I ran into a problem. I already had a biped animation set to test the rig, and didn't know how to delete it to start afresh. After discovering a forum post about it, I found that there is a button which deletes all of the animation. My second problem was that I needed a quick and easy way to select just the biped without having to hide everything else. After finding an Autodesk help document about Layers in Max, I remembered that I'd already set a dedicated layer for my biped when I made it.
Before starting the walk cycle, I first had to understand how to animate a biped in 3DS Max. I began by watching a YouTube video by Anand Hurkadli which goes through a very simplified method of animation. The method involves posing the biped into the key poses described above, copying them, and then pasting them to the opposite side of the biped to create a simple animation quickly.
After trying this method to start my animation it came out quite clunky, and it looked as if he was floating on air (see video below). This was because I had not yet used the curve editor, nor had I moved the body up and down to simulate weight.
Using a post on the tech-artist forums, I learnt how to use the curve editors for bipeds in 3DS Max. They're similar to the curve editors in Maya, except they have one very annoying limitation; you're forced to change the individual axis points as a group, rather than by themselves. This means that if the rotation of a bone used stepped curves, the positioning would also have to use stepped curves.
With a biped it's quite hard to change the height of the body as a whole, as you can't move the hip bones separately. This problem had me stuck for an hour whilst I tried to find an answer myself, and in the end I had to find a forum post on CG-Society which talks about moving the COM curves on the biped. It was a simple toggle which changed the COM from rotation to position curves.
After finishing editing the curve editor, it became apparent that the animation was running too slowly. I found a small tutorial by Jamie Gwilliam which showed a quick and easy method to speed up the animation timeline.
Although the animation isn't finished yet, I'm going to make basic versions of a couple of the other animations before polishing it. You can see the latest version of the walk cycle below. The next step, for example, is to re-do the feet using sliding keys and planted keys, which I will write about in my next walk cycle blog.
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