Important principles: Timing, Arcs, pose to pose

First, I need to find a clear reference, preferably with a frame count and a corresponding pose.

Previs, Blocking, spline and polish:

This is the usual way to do animation, or I think it can be a common way to work in other fields. That is, starting from layout, first complete the first overall matters, then make them in turn, and then decorate them all together.It’s efficient.Here I refer to 《The Animator’s Survival Kit》.

The reason for not making loops is also mentioned in this book, which would make the animation look very stiff, as game animations could be made that way, it was interactive. Animators should focus on more interesting and attractive animations.

Previs: Start with a rhythm. Instead of using spline, start with step Tangents. I choosed 5 frames, and I started with 12 frames per step, 24 frames per second.

In addition, you can save a lot of time by setting the mode in Preferences in advance.

Blocking：I pose on the keyframe determined by previs. First I just focused on the side view and animated the walk. And adding start and stop action, mainly pay attention to the center of gravity changes.

After making the side and looking at the front, we can see that the ball now walks straight without any body shaking. However, when walking, the center of gravity will change from side to side with the lifting of the legs, so we need to add the rotation and translation of the ball body here.

At the end I added a turn to move, considering the bending direction of the knee, and I need to add key frames to the knee, and the animation of the knee joint is dependent on the IK.

Again, I’m going to animate with step tangents, but notice the change of center of gravity here.

Before spline, I checked the blocking animation for several times again, so as to confirm that there is no sliding part on the foot. If it needs sliding, it is better to make a steady step first and then add sliding, so as to make it more convenient for making and modification.

Ok, now that we can change Step Tangents to Spline Tangents in the curve editor, you can see that the action is smoother, but it’s a little weird.

In the curve editor we can see that there are a lot of keyframes, and I think this might be a strange time to change the action too much, so I decided to try to delete some of them first.

I noticed that there were some problems that occurred between two key frames with the same value, and Spline Tangents made them fluctuate between them when we actually wanted them to be horizontal.I ended up using Auto Tangents to solve this problem.

Finally, in the polish part, I would like to add some Squash&Stretch to the ball to reflect its elasticity and give people a soft feeling.

This is my walking animation:

But I have to say that I don’t like the final animaiton. I don’t know what the problem is, I will study further and improve this animation later.