I'm still really lacking in confidence when it comes to walk cycles, so I thought I'd do some more playing around!
Only keyframes thus far. It's pretty simple but it seems to be mostly working. I need to adjust the arms very slightly and the hips need more of a defined arc, but it's getting there... I think!
Gotten a bit behind with the comics; planning on finishing them up this afternoon after I'm done playing around with this.
Long time no update! Essays and Digital Skills catchup have been dominating much of my life these past few weeks but I've been happily animating away all this time and have the majority of my animation blocked out in rough, which means I can spend the Christmas period simply cleaning up my lines. All I need to do is adjust certain parts of the sequence to get it all in order and it's ready to go!
I have about 18 seconds so far, around 300 — 400 frames on a mix of ones and twos. I think that once I've made the final tweaks to my sequence and doubled up some of my frames I'll be well within the timescale. Vimeo is currently still processing it so I'll whack that up later today, but in the meantime here's the last part I've been working on:
I needed a happy walk cycle for the section after he kicks the ball, something really quite jaunty and upbeat with large, high steps and swinging arms. I took a lot of inspiration from Milt Kahl's "Pinocchio" style walks. Some people very kindly animated Milt's thumbnails on Youtube:
There was also a very nice Milt-style walk in the Animator's Survival Kit that I kept glancing back to to make sure I was getting the posing right.
In the end, this is what I came up with: (Keyframes, doubles, 12fps until I get the inbetweens done)
It's not tremendously original but it's been a very useful exercise in observing timing, not to mention drag/overlap on the arms. If I can get the inbetweens finished today then I'll be sorted! The day is still young!
First attempt at a walk cycle! There are no inbetweens or arms at this stage. I wanted to make sure that the legs didn't look squiffy — would have been terrible if I'd spent ages on it only to discover that his legs moved backwards or something.
Really not happy with the posing of the figure to be honest, daft as it may sound! The proportions are a bit iffy as well. I was a little too worried about deviating from the handout we were given — the figure was copied almost directly from the handout and I seem to be struggling with pinning down the inbetweens as a result. I think that copying somebody else's lines kind of makes it difficult to picture how the other movements should look.
Still, all things considered, it seems smooth enough.
