Skeleton/Walking/Movement!

Today in class we was taught how to assign a skeleton to a figure to make it walk.
First of all I created a figure using a box, I simply used extrude and bevel tool to manipulate and generate a body figure.

 I then used the symmetry tool to create the full body shape; I only drew this up rough to get the understanding of the animation and technique which was being taught.

The next step was to go into the create tab, into systems and then select biped, I could then draw up the skeleton figure to roughly the same size as the figure which I created.

The next step was to put the skeleton inside of my created character, then select my character that I created and then in the modifier list chose ‘Physique’ and then chose a node which in this case was the skeleton, this then brought up another window and then I had to simply press initialize.  

I then clicked on the skeleton which was placed inside of my character, I then clicked on motion in the create tab which gave me a variety of animation options, I clicked on ‘footstep mode’ and then clicked on ‘create footsteps’ this allowed me to input a path of footprints that my character would the follow. 

When I played the animation the character did indeed follow the footsteps however the walk was quite unnatural and it was dragging parts of the character which it shouldn’t have been moving.

To try and correct how the character moved I had to try change the settings, to do this I had to select the skeleton and go into the modifier list and under ‘physique’ there is an option for ‘envelop’ I clicked on this and I could then select different parts of the skeleton, for example I was selecting different limbs on the body, and then on the right hand side in the modify settings I was changing the size of the radial scale, this basically ‘snapped’ anything in the area which was linked to that specific part of the body. This shaped the body a lot better and I was really pleased with the outcome on the legs, I managed to get a fairly realistic looking half of the body, which animated and walked quite nicely.

I didn’t manage to get a very good animation on the arms for some reason, but for a first attempt I was pleased with the outcome and I am sure I will benefit learning this technique in the future.

In the lesson we was advised when creating our characters to make them have the ‘Da Vinci’ pose or a star jump pose if you like. This was made clear for when it came to animating the character and using the envelope tool to assign specific parts to the node, this was because if the legs were close together and I was increasing the size of the radial scale there would be a good chance it would then select parts of the opposite leg.

Unfortunately I don’t think that there is a place in my animation for this technique, however I am pleased to have learned it.