Walk Assignment - What I'm missing

Through the feedback I've gotten on the walk videos so far I've realised that I've missed a lot of important movements in the walk cycles. Mainly swaying and weight shifting. I'm currently working on this to improve the overall animation.

It was difficult to see sway and weight shift from the side in my reference and luckily another classmate came across this gem of a website: Referencereference.com
It's packed with all kinds of walk cycles from all kinds of people and other cool things like animal walk cycles and fight reference. I used one of the young men references for 'sad walk' to help with the weight shift.

I also looked through The Animator's Survival Kit again for more information on weight shift which really helped jog my memory about all the twists in walk cycles. I've pretty much missed out all the spine and shoulder twists that should have been in the walk cycles. I'm currently working to put all those in my animation.

Here is a nice example of a 3D walk cycle:



This shows the weight shift very nicely and the character's movement is less stiff. Certainly a lot less stiff than mine... I could learn from this.

My tutor has kindly given me a link to a blog post about 3D walk cycles which was also another massive help! Reading through it has further shown me what I've missed!


Another piece of feedback particularly about the part where Malcolm finds the penny is to 'milk it!' Basically have him stay at the point a little longer, perhaps looking around to see if anyone's watching or express delight. I think to go with the relief he expresses after picking up to penny I should have him look around to make sure no one is looking or going to take it from him.