How do I make someone walk in circles?

[Rasheed]

I want to make someone walk in circles, a bit like the ball in this animation:

(source here)

Although the ball isn't rolling, it changes size when it follows the path of the walk circle. The ball is a circle filled with a texture. I exported the shape as PNG, edited it in a image editor and saved it as a PNG texture file, then I selected the fill effect texture, with the created PNG texture file as image file, stretched over the whole circle. If I wanted to, I could create a series of switch layers, with a different fill texture for each position on the walk circle, thus creating the illusion of a rolling ball.

The ball is animated in a normal vector layer, while the walk circle is rotated and translated to act as a 3D circular path, as a path on the floor. The walk circle looks like this:

I will only use it to plan the steps of the walking character. The circumference is divided into 32 equal distances for the 16 steps I plan to let my character take along the circle. Each step will last 8 frames, so the animation will take 128 frames (5 and 1/3 seconds).

My character has to do a jolly walk, with maybe even some hopping.

I'm curious if I can pull this off. Any help on the way is appreciated.

[Sevenmile]

Wow... that's really ambitious... and very very hard i suppose. I guess you can make it a lot easier if you use make some kind of psuedo-3d effect where the background moves around the character or something, or if you use some smart storyboarding/cutting or let the charcter move from left to right in a straight line instead...
/Sevenmile

[Rasheed]

@Sevenmile: Well, it IS ambitious and I hope I can do it.

You're right that I shouldn't use 3D animation, see what happens if one does:

(source here)

Here is a closeup of frame 24 of this animation.


The center cube is going up and down and the outer cube is following a square path above the walk path (West-South-East-North). Depth sorting and sorting by true distance is turned on. As you can see, layers are sorted, not (parts of the) sides of the cubes. This poses a problem if I want to use the walk path to position my character in 3D: between West-South-East the walk path layer is sorted above the outer cube and between East-North-West below.

It would be very tricky (if not impossible) to position the character on the walk circle. One would have to position and reposition the workspace, to look at each frame from different angles to position the character precisely in each frame and do a lot of tweaking among all the frames to create a fluent walk cycle. I think a 3D animation program is better suited for these kinds of jobs than Moho.

So I have decided to do this animation in a flat plane. I'll export the image of the walk path and use it as a guide to position and scale my character in a two-dimensional animation.

[Rasheed]

The first have done is to construct an image of the walking space, i.e. the space where my character is walking. It is not a real 3D image, but a projection of a 3D image. My character is going to move in this same projected 3D space.


(click on picture to enlarge, Moho source)

With this image as a guide, I know where the contact positions on the floor are, what the walking direction is and how relatively tall and wide my character is at every position on the walking circle. Now I can create the contact positions and the key frames for the jolly walking character with more certainty.

[Toontoonz]

Instead of looking at it from an 3D perspective when designing it, why not look at from the top down (and from front, right and left)?

Make the ground, make your character, make her walk (using actions - if the feet touches the ground in your action it will touch the ground everywhere else in the animaton), then put it all together like in Tutorial 5.8.
Move the object in a circle along the timeline via the translate layers tool.
In Moho, one makes the 3D perspective by adjusting the camera angle.
Fairly simple to do with Moho.

Here is a simple movement of a tree moving in a circle. Created by adjusting Moho tutorial 5.8. (0.25 MB)
treemovie.mov
The problem area will be when it turns the corners - as you can see in the video the tree is always facing the camera as it moves in its circle.

[Rasheed]

@Toontoonz: I tried your method for almost five hours, but I don't seem able to put it to use Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I don't know.

But I guess a static tree is something completely different from a animated character.

Well, back to the drawing board.

BTW Here is the character I used:

[Toontoonz]

Here is a character who is moving its head and arms while moving around in a circle in a 3D environment. The animation is nothing special, just something quick to show you that one can animate the character and move it in a circle in a 3D space.
One could do the same thing with a character walking.

Purple thing moving in a circle into the z-axis.mov
Anyone interested in experimenting with an animated character moving in a 3D space I suggest doing Tutorials 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 5.8 (don´t read them, do them).

[Rasheed]

One could do the same thing with a character walking.

... you claim, but the problem is aligning the contact positions. Walking in a straight line is very different from walking in a circle. The contact positions will not fit from one step to the next. The leading leg has to move sideways, instead of straight forwards. If you use walking in a straight line, you'll never be able to align the feet.

However, I think I found a solution to this feet alignment problem. Look at this animation:

(Moho source)

It's still a bit crudely animated, but I hope you see what I'm trying to accomplish. The purple cross is actually a switch layer, in which I have drawn a cross in different angles of perspective. And then there is a group layer with a rectange and the same purple cross. I've translated the group layer frame-by-frame along to points on the circumference of the circle on the floor. I haven't used "Rotate to face the camera", so the group layer is always facing in the same direction (the camera is stationary anyway, so facing the camera wasn't really needed).

Now the rectangle has become a frame in which the purple cross is animated to fit its position on the circle. Using the frame as a reference, I think it is much easier to create a walking animation. The contact positions are roughly drawn as seen from different angles. Now it is a matter of aligning the feet from one step to the next in the contact positions, then add the passing positions, the down and the up positions.

Every frame has to be drawn separately, because interpolation makes no sense using this method.

[Toontoonz]

Rasheed - Good luck!

What is the purpose of this excercise???

[Rasheed]

What is the purpose of this excercise???

To learn how to animate in three dimensions. I want to be able to animate characters with volume. I think this will improve my animation skills.

I've tried to create an animation of two spheres that acts as feet. It looks pretty convincing (although there are a few object ordering mistakes in it, that really don't matter at this stage).

(Moho source)

In the Moho file there is a guiding plane I've used to see what comes where, but I've eliminated it in the animation above (it's only a guide for construction). I think it's very useful to aid me in the concept of drawing volume and space in a flat vector layer rotated in three-dimensional space.

[Toontoonz]

So when will we see some of your animation using characters with volume?

And is Moho really the best drawing/animation software to do this type of animation?
Moho´s strength is bones and the 3D environment. It seems neither of these would be used in what you describe. Your animation would need frame-by-frame drawing of the character.

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On a more general learning subject and creating a portfolio to show clients I think perhaps it is more important to show art style, creativity, sizzle/spark in the work, timing and exaggeration in animation than other things.
How often does one need to do animation of something walking in a circle? I understand you are trying to learn, but why choose something so difficult and time consuming? A friend of mine wanted to be an artist so for his first painting he decided to paint a giant 4 foot (120 cm) x 6 foot (150 cm) very detailed, complicated painting. After a couple of days he gave up being an artist - "It is just too hard to get what I want!" Well, maybe if he would have started smaller and simpler and worked up to something more difficult maybe he could have become an artist.
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What are your goals as an animator? To work for an animation company or create your own movie, TV series, web toons or just doing it for a fun hobby to learn?

[Rasheed]

just doing it for a fun hobby to learn?

You guessed it.

I will take your comments under consideration, although I personally think Moho is so much broader than just bones and 3D. And I think there's nothing wrong to animate without bones and 3D, but use the other tools of Moho more extensively.

I hope this excercise will enable me to create better quality animation. Perhaps I can show you some less academic stuff in the near future.

[Rasheed]

I've done even a better job than earlier. I've turned the blue plane perpendicular to the circumference of the walking circle. Now this plane become the divider between what's in front and behind the body (well, if there were a body). Using this invention, it is real easy to deform the circles to shoe-forms and have them shown in the correct perspective along the walking circle.

(click on the image to show the 115 Kb GIF animation, Moho source)

[teotoon]

I think, before doing anything in Moho, we have to study the movement through classical animation techniques. Without discovering the essence of th movement, one cannot construct the scene even in such an exteremely hany software as Moho.

So, here are some sketches and a rough animation to study the movement...

http://www.geocities.com/teotoon/Moho/r ... alk_01.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/teotoon/Moho/r ... alk_02.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/teotoon/Moho/r ... alk_03.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/teotoon/Moho/walk_circle.gif

[Rasheed]

@Teotoon: Thanks for that one. I've tried constructing in Moho, but you're right, it doesn't work that way.

Like your chartoon character