Animation 1 Walk Cycle - Contact Poses

Using a pre-rigged character (the Ultimate Bony rig, found here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/17774421/Ultimate-Rigs-for-Free) I started to animate a walk cycle. For now, all I have done is the contact poses, meaning the poses the character is in when they are fully win contact with the ground and is about to take their next step.

I would go into detail about what I have done, but for this case I think it is better to share the tutorial that I followed along with for these poses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAD84OQ1wyI. I feel that the creator of the tutorial explains everything much more usefully than I could, and I highly recommend viewing her channel and others like her's to gain valuable knowledge and help get things moving for yourself. (Just to note, she is using the Ultimate Beefy rig found on the same link I posted in the beginning. I decided to go with the Bony rig, but ultimately the choice doesn't matter all that much.)

Animation 1 Midterm

For my midterm, I took the pear model that I had made previously and decided to do a more cartoon-like animation for it. In order to animate the bending effects I had to use two different bend deformers, one for the top half of the pear and one for the bottom half.

In order to easily animate these deformers, I created two new attributes for the pear called "Bend Top" and "Bend Bottom". To do this, click the "Edit" button that appears in the channel box and select "Add Attribute". A menu appears to edit the settings of this new attribute, the important thing for right now is the minimum and maximum values. Before adding the attributes, I took note of how far I wanted the pear to bend on either half (done by messing with the "Curvature" attribute of the Bend deformer), and found that I wanted the top half to bend from a range of -75 to 75, and the bottom half from -25 to 25. So, when I made the attributes Bend Top and Bend Bottom, I gave them their respective minimum and maximum values. Now, even after making the attributes, those attributes don't actually do anything yet, which means Driven Keys have to be used.

For the pear's top half, I needed to control the curvature of the top bend deformer, making that the object being Driven, while the new attribute Bend Top is what would be controlling the bend deformer, making that the driver.

Now that everything is selected, the values for Bend Top must be assigned to the respective values for the curvature. I made sure both values were set to 0, and then hit "Key". I then did this when both values were at -75, and then when both were at 75. After doing this, the Bend Top attribute now had proper control over the bending of the pear's top half within a certain range. The same process was used for Bend bottom, but with the values ranging from -25 to 25 instead.

After that, animating the pear itself was relatively simply. One thing to note about the camera zoom was that in order to animate it I had to right-click on the "Focal Length" attribute of the camera and select "Key Selected". This was because setting keyframes for the camera only tracks the position of the camera, not the zoom. Also, the waving, freehand looking movement of the camera while it is following the pear's fall was achieved more or less on accident; I simply kept dragging the camera by hand and keyframing in order to keep the pear in frame. This meant the camera did not travel in a completely straight line, creating the effect.