4 legged animal animation help.

dinosaurmad87

Hi everyone does anybody know how to do a 4 legged animal walk cycle as I'm trying to do it with 1 of my Dinosaurs (Stegosaurus) and having trouble getting it right.

Could anybody help me or create a video tutorial to show me how it's done?

Chears, Ian. :)

Mattymanx

The only thing I could recommend is to watch videos on how large animals such as elephants, giraffes and hippos walk. Observe their movement and try to translate that into the animation.

SandmanGFX

I think it is harder than it seems. You will have to understand the skeletal structure of the animals in order to create a realistic representations of their movement. If this is your goal I'd advise you to start with creating walk cycles of people first, then go over to more familiar animals like cats or dogs. Once they look good you'll be able to tackle the challenge of breathing life into more unfamiliar animals, such as dinosaurs.
When you're observing the animals try to develop an eye for their skeleton. Try to understand how the individual bones move and why. This will take some time, but if you have patience you'll find this to be very helpful. It is something I had to do for my publicity design course. It involves a lot of drawing and observing. Really good fun. Just don't be afraid to fail at first :-)

And then there is the software which doesn't make things easy for you. There are some scripts that help with walk cycles. Have a look at the link below, they're somewhere in there. Lots of other goodies too.

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/

Hope this helps.

Dream Cutter

I gave it a go a while back and found this article helpful:http://www.rocket5studios.com/tutorials/approaches-to-animating-quadrupeds-the-walk-cycles/

With that knowledge, I made a pig walk gait that you can download here: http://farmpeeps.com/jorge_hog_3d_pig.html

carolinebegbie

What a great article - thank you, Dream Cutter.