In Depth - Lexie Walking Animation (Part 1)

Part of the purpose of setting up this Patreon was to have more in depth looks in how I put these scenes together. Unfortunately at some point it felt like I was just repeating myself, and regular scenes didn't have that much special going on with them. But I have learned a few new tricks when I put this together, so why not combine that with gifs that show how it got together in the first place?

(This also turned out to take a bit longer than expected, so I'm splitting this up into a few parts.)

To start off with, I got particularly inspired after seeing two videos of a woman bouncing about with an oversized shirt. Given how I have been chipping away at Lexie's repurposed story, it felt perfect for me to try to recreate it in some way. But I wanted to do more than just a simple walking animation that loops. Or at least more than just slight motions of the head and face expressions, so that was my goal with this. That way, it will also show more of her character and just be more of an engaging animation in general.

Like with many others I started with Mixamo animations that cut down on the vast majority of the animation work. I'm no animator by any stretch, so I'll cut any corner I can get as long as it looks good. The process of retargeting the animation to the Lexie rig is basically identical to the Nicky one, except that I found a better way to do it. One that's less destructive to the rig, meaning it doesn't ruin the rig so that it can't be used for anything else anymore. That was vital to make sure my recent improvements would still play nice.

Prior to this point, the walking animations I've done were always static. They'd walk but actually did not move forwards, like on a treadmill. I assumed it was less of a headache and went for it, without testing the alternative. I assumed correctly.

The big problem here is that it is trickier to make the animation to loop on itself. If the person isn't moving, it is simply a matter of duplicating the keyframes and you're all set. But when you're dealing with actual motion, I had to find a way to maintain that momentum. My 'setup', if that is what you can call it, is to reparent the different possible animations to one dummy/blank object and move it forwards (when the loop starts) so that it is a seamless transition.

If done correctly, noone is the wiser! And I can extend the animations with more loops after the fact. This however... ended up biting me later when I ran into issues with the hair and breast physics. I suspect there are some areas in this that could have easily been avoided if I did proper research into each of the required elements, such as retargeting animations. But no, I'd much rather bash my head against the wall with the limited knowledge I have!

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So at this point Lexie follows the other model with the walking animation, how would you add animation on top of it? So that she's taking a selfie video and all?

Animation Layers~

Previously I hadn't even used this, and in retrospect I don't understand how I was able to do ANY animations before this point. It's such a lifesaver and a really nice way to clearly structure the setup that you have to make for the animation. As the name suggests, it allows you to layer animations on top of one another. If you've worked with animation and keyframes in the past, you probably know the pain of having too many keyframes cluttering things and making tweaks a huge ordeal. Well this just lets you start 'fresh' with a clean timeline to add keyframes in. This can also get as cluttered (if not worse) if you're not careful with it, but I seemed to avoid that with Lexie's animation. The layers allowed me to add my own animations on top and  to tweak the retargeted walking loop (mainly the legs, at their furthest they kinda 'snap' which looks really jarring).

This is it for part 1, future parts will most likely cover the breast physics, hair physics and clothing animation (nothing too new but I think it's worth covering it). It's been a long while since I wrote something like this, and I'm entirely sure how in-depth I should go, or to keep it more surface level for all audiences to understand. If you're interested, be sure to let me know! This might be worth polling as well.