6.10.2022 - 19.10.2022 (Week 6 - Week 8)
Chung Yi Ki / 0345014 / BDCM
Animation
Fundamentals
Project 1: Vanilla Walk Animation
Lecture
Week 6 / Walk cycle
Solid drawing skill is critical in understanding for walk cycle animation,
especially figure drawing and constructive drawing skills.
For a looping animation, the start and end frame should have the same
drawing. This should be taken note of when animating a looping animation
using straight ahead method.
There should be an even timing for a walk cycle, 3 frames for each pose.
Even timing doesn't only apply to walk cycle, but also applicable for
effects such as fire and ocean wave.
Vanilla walk cycle
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Fig 1.1 Walk cycle breakdown from The Animator's Survival Kit Source: https://edwardboyleanimation.wordpress.com/category/walk-cycle-run-cycle-and-weight-exercise/page/2/ |
The vanilla walk cycle is the most standard walk cycle in animation. The
poses needed for a half a cycle of a walk cycle includes a contact pose,
down pose, pass pose and up pose. The remaining half is the flipped
(mirrored) versions of the poses for the first half.
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Fig 1.2 Timing of walk cycle on 12's, which isn't encourage Source: https://archive.org/details/TheAnimatorsSurvivalKitRichardWilliams/page/n113/mode/2up?view=theater |
A natural looking walk cycle generally have 2 steps per second. Which means
each step has 12 drawings, which is 4 frames in each gap of the drawings (if
animating on 2's). But it's better to animate on 3's. The contact pose
(first and last frame of the walk) has the head in contact with the median
line, the passing pose (first inbetween) has the head a bit over the median
line, the down pose (before the passing pose) has the head below the median
line, while the up pose (after the passing pose) has the head two thirds
above the median line (higher than the passing pose).
In a normal walk cycle, the arms are always opposite the legs to give a
forward motion to the action. For the legs of the passing pose, the starting
leg is straight while the other leg is raised up, bent. The down pose has
the starting leg bent a lot to almost 90 degrees and the other leg is more
bent downwards as well. While the up pose has the starting leg raised up
from the heels and the other leg raised up as well but bent facing
forward.
Instructions
Project 1: Vanilla walk animation
For project 1, we are tasked to create a walk cycle animation based on the
vanilla walk cycle in the book "Animator's Survival Kit". The same character
used in
exercise 4
can be used back here and there should be a total of 4 different poses, which
are the contact pose, down pose, pass pose and up pose. Each pose should last
for 3 frames and a side view and front view walk cycle needs to be animated
for the character. The rough and clean up animation should be compiled in one
video as submission.
Keyframes reference
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| Fig 1.1 Key poses reference side view |
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| Fig 1.2 Side view key poses timing and height distance for on 8's |
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| Fig 1.3 Arm movement reference |
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| Fig 1.4 Front view key poses reference |
In the book The Animator's Survival Kit, I went to find reference of key poses for the side view and front view of vanilla walk cycle, as well as the timing for it and the arm movements. Since each key pose need to last for 3 frames, I referenced the timing for animating the walk cycle on 8's and the height difference of it. I also looked at the information on swinging arm movements in the book to create a flexible movement.
Rough animation
Fig 2.1 Rough structure of side view walk (looped once)
Fig 2.2 Rough structure of front view walk (looped once)
Fig 2.3 Rough side view walk using character (looped once)
Fig 2.4 Rough front view walk using character (looped once)
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| Fig 2.5 Changing arm swing and leg distance for side view |
I then brought the rough structure sketch done in Adobe Animate into Krita as
a base reference to sketch out the character, Luz. I adjusted the leg and arm
swing distance for the side view walk as I felt the first sketch was too
mechanical. The character's head is also larger than the head of the first
sketch to match the proportions of the character. Other than that, I also
tried animating the hair ends to have some follow through and drag to give the
animation more life.
Clean up animation
Clean up animation
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| Fig 3.1 Arm swing distance change and body and head slant change |
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| Fig 3.2 Filling in colours by picking the colours from the original character reference |
Fig 3.3 Clean up side view walk (looped once)
Fig 3.4 Clean up front view walk (looped once)
After that, I imported the rough sketch animation into Adobe Animate to clean
up the strokes and fill in colours. I copied some of the body parts from
exercise 4 into this project to quicken my process of cleaning up the strokes.
For the side view walk, I adjusted the arm swing distance to be nearer again
in the clean up stage as I thought the movement is still too big happening in
a short time. I also made the body and head to be a bit more upright since the
rough sketch felt too leaned forward. After finishing with the cleaned
strokes, I pick the colours from an original image reference of the character
using the eye dropper tool and fill it in the animation using pain bucket tool
and classic brush tool.
Fig 3.5 Further adjusted clean up aide view walk (looped once)
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| Fig 3.6 Onion skin of head, front arm and back arm |
I later felt that the up and down motion is too big and the arm movement still
felt a bit stiff in the first clean up attempt. So, in referencing Fig 1.2
about animating walks on 8's, I decreased the up and down distance from the
contact pose to reduce the choppiness. For the arms, I adjusted the length of
the arm in each keyframe to make sure they follow an arc and increase the
bending of the strokes and hand more in the down and up pose. I also decreased
the distance change for the back arm to make it looks more natural.
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| Fig 3.7 Compiling rough and clean up in Adobe Premier Pro |
After finishing with the clean up, I compile the rough and clean up animations into one video and with labels in Adobe Premiere Pro for submission. Each video is looped for 1-2 times in the compilation.
Final Vanilla walk cycle
Fig 4.1 Final compilation of rough and clean up walk cycle animation
Feedbacks
Week 10
The feet motion looks ok, the hair flowing animation looks good. But the hands movement for the side view seems to be too fast, he would need to look at it frame by frame to see the problem.
Reflection
This project was in a way fun for me to do. Walk cycle is always something I
wanted to try out animating and I'm glad that I got to do it for this project.
Although I was frustrated at some part in the clean up process as Adobe
Animate would sometimes add more anchor points by itself to the strokes, and I
had to spend time deleting all the anchor points to edit the strokes
accurately again. Colouring each frame also took a lot of time. Before I found
out I can colour the boundary of a region and use pain bucket tool to fill the
inner space, I slowly coloured some part using the brush tool and erase the
excess colour fill since some of the strokes aren't closed, and hence pain
bucket can't fill it in directly. But other than that, I enjoyed the process
of animating the walk cycle and having made the character turn around in
exercise 4 before helped a lot in getting the proportions right. This project
also helped me in understanding how to use Adobe Animate more.
loving ur walk!
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