Sad character walk V3

Here we go again!!


Rather than struggling on editing my old walk cycle, I decided to just start fresh using my old frames as reference. Sometimes it's quicker just to start with a blank canvas — tweaking my old animation was just needlessly complicated and frustrating, because you kind of end up locked into your old mistakes and limited by what's already there... if that makes sense?!

Andy gave me some great advice on the position of the legs. Previously it appeared as if the toes dragged through the ground. Here I've tried to rectify the problem by marking where the hips would be, allowing me to easily give them a little torsion (is that the right word to use?) and lift the leg a little further off the ground, mostly solving the problem.

The mood isn't quite there yet — obviously without inbetweens the timing is off, making it look a bit angry!

I attempted to act out the walk a few times and I noticed that, rather than in a "conventional" cycle where the heel brushes the ground and the foot smoothly strikes the floor, I tended to bring my foot straight down very suddenly. When dragging my feet, my toes were very slow to come off the floor and they were dragged almost reluctantly upwards. I'm going to experiment with this timing by delaying the lift of the toes until the last possible moment when they're dragged upwards before coming straight back down much faster.

It's interesting to note how, without any inbetweens, this walk is very similar to how an "angry" cycle might look. In an angry cycle the character might bring his feet up very fast and slap them straight back down with very little pause — similar to here. This could save me a lot of time later on if, for my angry cycle, I can refer back to this cycle and simply make minor adjustments to timing.

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