Research (Richard Williams)

As I'm not fully happy with my first three attempts, I've decided to make further research.

I've looked at Richard Williams's book and watched his videos. Firstly, I didn't noticed anything I was doing wrong, but then I've realized that my problem lies in small details, such as putting some key frames in the wrong time.

Here are few images that helped me understanding my problems:

In this image we can see that contact position doesn't exactly has to be the lowest and the arms aren't at their widest. Also the passing position isn't the highest. The extremes are happening between them.

However, in this example we can see that we can put the extremes in the contact positions and it still is going to work.

Then I've learnt that if we want to add some character we have to build a walk cycle by either changing the passing or contact positions. Once the basic walk cycle is established we can add some character.

Here are few examples:

Another thing I found interesting is double bounce. It's adding a lot of character and rhythm to animation. And again we can experiment with that:

In my previous walk attempts I had a problem with arms. They were changing their length and the animation wasn't very smooth. Here is nice example of how arms should be animated:

To make the arms feel loose it's good to overlap the hands and break the elbow at some point. In order to keep the arms the same length through out the animation, it's good to mark the joints and move them in arcs. I've also noticed that shoulders are moving as well and their movement is opposite to the hip movements.