Moho Forum

Before I want to do run cycles, I want to be able to do walk cycles. In Richard Williams' book "The Animator's Survival Kit" there is an extensive tutorial on regular walks, cartoon walks and how to create your own type of walk. The book seems to be geared towards traditional animators, but computer animators should benefit from it as well.

Q: I was wondering, how do you do your walk cycles with Anime Studio?

Here's an animation I made, a walk on 16's. I'm sure I can do this much better, but it's a start and I will be trying to improve it in the next version. The AS project file was originally 16:9, but I resized it to 4:3 with DIVX Converter before uploading it to YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mAAMSpw314

The project file can be downloaded as a zip archive, regular walk.anme.zip.

I basically drew a character, rigged it with bones (points binding), drew the position of the steps on screen, and animated using the contacts, passing positions, ups for both left and right and did the inbetweens, so the animation had keyframes on 2's. Then I copied the left/right animation to the next steps by dragging the root level bone in the correct position (BTW I made an error in the last step).

I had some problems with the correct position of the legs, relative to the torso, and the deformation of the legs and the foot due to bone action. The position of the legs is easily solved and I guess the deformation can be solved with corrective points animation.

Edit: I did just that with the following animation (project file can be dowloaded here: regular walk 2.anme.zip):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkC9JyO5m6g

Thanks Rasheed, I have been reading the same book and have just now begun to attempt walk cycles! Talk about timing!
Please, more.

@ingie01: I'm highly motivated, so I guess I will be doing and sharing a lot more.

Still, I'm curious how others do walk cycles.

On paper.

I use Williams' book as well, of course. It really is a good training to do a walk cycle every day ... as long as one finds the time to do it, which unfortunately with my recent job I don't have.

I do it on paper because I'm used to it, and because it only has to be rough and sketchy. IMO AS is more suited to do the "final" artwork. I would scan in my drawings as a reference only, then tweak a character to fit the movement. IMO the rigging takes too much time, it distracts me from the animation process, so I see AS as the "cleanup" of my animation.

It looks good Rasheed. Am I correct in understanding you drew out the whole sequence, and didn't use Actions?

I'd like to know more about creating a walk cycle using Actions, and then when using it in a scene, have it not float or skate along the desired path. Drawing each step in an actual scene is great for traditional animators, used to drawing each frame of the scene, but to use AS to the best of it's abilities, learning to do a good walk cycle using Actions would be desirable for me...

It'd be re-uable (hopefully), and if you decided to adjust the timing of the animation or the length of the actors walk, it wouldn't require starting over (again, hopefullly)...

slowtiger wrote:On paper.

ditto.

Most of my stuff starts on paper, usually as layouts. I find animation directly on the scene is usually not the fastest way. I (or my key animator) rough out the keys, thwn I scan them in before using AS as a line-tester - next I space the drawings out to get the best timing. Finally AS is used to do the clean-up.

On drawing - I use blue or orange pencil for rough drafting, then go over the key line with black pencil. I sometimes "cut-out" the charcter in photoshop first, then import as .png into AS. That way, I can scale the character and reposition on the actual background - if you have the 100% A4 scan, you can't see what is on the BG.

Rhoel

I think the problem is that paper and pencil has no real good equivalent in computer hardware or software, although a digitizing tablet with stylus is very close if you have a fast enough computer and a good sketching program (e.g. Alias SketchBook Pro).

What he says!

Although I'm using some of the best available products in that field, I can't say that drawing and even more animating on a tablet is as good as doing it on paper. Maybe it's because I am used to pen and paper since my childhood, but I see some clear advantages of that old-fashioned technique, at least when I use my drawing board.
1. I can turn the disc to optimize my drawing angle - makes curved lines smooth in any direction.
2. I can flip the drawings - the effect is much different from onion-skinning. In fact, all of my animation teachers told me never to animate with lights on or with transparent paper. They all advised me to use flipping.
3. I can put drawings off the pegs - great for clean-up, controlling volumes and stuff.
4. I'm much more accurate on paper - down to a quarter millimeter, or half a pencil stroke's width (and it's sharp!).