Walk Cycle

I re did a walk cycle because I wasn't very proud of the first one I did, it was slow and didn't flow well. So I chose to redo it for the show reel.

At first I was going to use maya to do my walk cycle in. But I had recently been playing around with a little program called Miku Miku Dance. Its a free japanese animation program that has been translated (poorly I might add) for us not Japanese speaking lot.

I was quite excited to use MMD because it has a motion capture feature, all you need for the motion capture was an Xbox Kinect, which I so happened to own as well. The program can capture everything except for facial features and finger movements.

Now the kinect can be used on a computer with the correct drivers, which I spent a good few hours figuring out out how to install correctly. The official drivers are yet to be released but I thought I'd give it a go and see if I could get it running with the unofficial ones. I couldn't. Miku Miku Dance refused to find the Kinect sensor and didn't think it was installed. It was a shame because it would have been a lot of fun to much around with motion capture, jumping around my house like a mad person.

In the end I decided to just animated by hand a walk cycle. I like MMD's style of models and there are many to find aswell. This was the first full animation I did in MMD.




I had a little trouble with her feet, I don't know if thats a problem on my part or on the rig itself, overall I am happy with the walk and think it a lot better than my first one.

This walk flows a lot better then my first attempt a year ago, I got the timing a lot better on this one, I feel she could afford to be a little slower but I don't want to play around with the timing too much.