Hey Nathi – good questions.
Create stationary first:
That’s fine but but it’s probably going to be harder to get your head around what you need to change on the curves to adjust it from stationary to translating.
What you can do is actually animate the root moving backwards in space, so the character stays in the same spot but it’s a translating walk. You can then mute that root movement to switch between the 2 styles. Make sense?
Starting Point Animation:
Totally!.That’s what the pros do 😉
Dwayne is spot on here. At first, practice actually doing it. But then it’s a matter of working smarter not harder. We reuse animation all the time as a starting point, from entire cycles, to snippets of one shot in another.
This takes practice too, as it’s probably going to be slower at first, but once you have a deep understanding of animation data and your work flow, you will know when it’s faster to reuse something or start from scratch.
Sometimes you can even have 2 versions of a cycle you want to reuse (or take the highly polished one and strip it back to the key poses).
eg – walk_cycle_final and walk_cycle_poses
Hope that all makes sense.
Keep up the learning!
.
