Well, in this week 9 we are introduced to a problem that follows the animators till the end of their careers: Pops!
In the previous week we saw the importance of finding great gold poses. They are crucial for the moment to clear your inbetweens and everything.

"Okay, okay... Now I'm curious! Explain about these pops!"

Pops are dislocations improper in a short interval of time. It happens when something moves too much from one frame to another and he seems to jump. As an (bad) example, take a photo with your hand holding a cheek. Now, without moving, take a photo with the same hand in your mouth. Flip the two pictures and you'll see the hand jumping. Well, as you know, in 3d animation you should follow the rig model. I've had experiences with 2d animation in college and I can say that when you have something popping, you deform the design with your pencil or your tablet and will have no more problems... for now.

The biggest pop I suffered was the knees. It's a big challenge to put them in the right place and not let them jump. All this mixed with their gold poses. If they do not work, you can not fix the rest. In 3d this step is called Spline, where you will smooth your tangents on Graph Editor. To corrections, there are 3 parties in the body that work for this exercise: hips, leg and foot.

"Geez..! I don't know how these things work!"

First of all, walking is a system of controlled falls where energy is conserved. Knowing this, let's start with the hips. Last week we understand that here is a rotation during the change of steps. This happens to you don't lose your balance andbe able to control your center of gravity. The rotation occurs at the hip joint, not at the lower back. From the top view, you will have something like this:


Note that in passing position or close to it's when your body is straight. It is the moment that minimizes the body's center of gravity and prevents you to fall. The motion of walking is not perfect. It will behave like a boucing ball, but the difference is arc looks like a wave. Track the hips. Moving like a wave? Great, It's working.

Okay, now let's talk about the legs. Something that can give character to your walk is what you do with the legs. People tend to find that they spend most of the walk stretched or even forget to think about the move it behaves.

The legs are broken at joints and tend to move different in side and front view. The knee will go out at sometimes and will close to the hip on another.  Also, do you remember the pendulum's exercise? The leg behaves like that, look:


"This is just crazy."

Actually, this is just  just too much information. When you start doing, makes sense. You will find your biggest problem in your legs, in my opinion: the knees pops. To control this, you should stretch the leg sometimes, have to pull the hips more forward or backward othertimes.

The foot is also broken into joint too, which gives toes for you.

We can not forget to make the overlap movement of the toes. This makes the animation much more dynamic. Furthermore, the foot will make an arc like this:


Note that the foot is about to leave the ground with a position and lands in another. You land your foot heel, until have 100% of the foot on the floor. Then you get to take your heels until finally the toes.

"Wow...  I can feel the nightmare chasing me... What the hack?"

Yeah, in practice you realize why the animators have work to do a good walk cycle.

Track everything and see what happens. Don't let your knees have very different spacings. Don't leave the shin repeat movements. Make it always move in one direction, remember the pendulum. Remember how your foot lands and especially the arc that he must follow. Don't rely on the computer. Make the most of the frames by hand and then worry about cleaning up the Graph Editor when it makes sense. But most importantly: have fun! :)

Below my entire assignment of this week. See you!