Studio Task: Animating a Walk Cycle in Maya

Moom is a preset character model for use in Maya and it's what I used in my introduction to animating using keyframes in Maya. Moom is already rigged to go, so in order to animated a walk cycle it is all a matter of posing the rig by manipulating it in Maya.

The Richard Williams Walk Cycle I used as reference for my animation

To start off with, Moom needs a flat plane to stand on, so first I created a primitive plane shape. Second, in order to properly mimic the key poses required for a walk cycle, I created another polygonal plain with a texture with a photo taken from Richard Williams Animators Survival Kit applied to it, to use as reference. These were all placed on separate layers to the character rig so that I didn't accidentally select the floor plain when trying to move the character's legs for example.

The way the rig is constructed means that the arms move on a sort of pivot, requiring me to equip the rotation tool in order to simulate movement of the arms. The legs however move just fine with the standard move tool, however one must be careful when using the perspective camera to ensure the legs do not stray too far from the y axis. In order to do this I kept a close eye on the front, side and top views to ensure Moom was walking in a straight line. To create a keyframe I pressed 's' on the keyboard, however Maya has an Auto-Keyframe option to make it easier and more efficient.

The way in which I animated my walk cycle was by animating one element at a time and going back and editing the keyframes until I had the full movement. This mean't starting off my animating the head and body bobbing up and down, then animating the legs and finally the arms. This sort of pose-to-pose animation ensures consistency across all the frames, making for a more believable walk cycle.

Once completing the walk cycle I exported it using the playbast feature, which captures the project workspace and exports it as a quicktime mov. I chose to capture my walk cycle from multiple angles to show off how naturalistic I managed to get the character to move, although in the future I would like to include in-betweens to create a smoother motion, as it stands now the cycle does seem a little too jerky.