Week 6: Big Dog

Big Dog

Exercise 1

i) If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.
FL BR, BL FR.
The FL & BR moves together at the same time, crossing over with the BL & FR.

ii) Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.
When the FL & FR cross paths with each other, the distance between BL & BR increase to maintain the CG within the surface area of theBigDog. 
When the FL & FR cross paths with each other, the distance between BL & BR increase to maintain the CG within the surface area of theBigDog.

iii)     Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked. (group work with Cindy)

Exercise 2

For our first lesson on animation of walking characters, we looked at how the Big Dog moves.
We had to take note of its key poses at certain points to replicate the walk in Maya.

Breaking down the animation process into key poses made it easier to animate.

We made use of the graph to adjust the movements, adding acceleration at some points (curves).

The legs were adjusted to crossover in different key poses.

Here's a playblast of the animation i did.

As you can see, it wasn't done very well because the legs are still sort of sliding along.

Overall, i could have done better adjusting the legs of the Big Dog. I messed up a couple of keyframes which made its movements very awkward.