Moho Forum

This is a walk cycle that took me about an hour to figure out. I have been studying the movements of humans when the walk through various cartoons, pictures, movie, ect. and I think this is the closest I can get. Give me a rating.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ue1fmFwQFiE

It's good for a start but I have some suggestions:

1. You've got the positions right but it needs to be faster. Humans don't normally walk that slow. I'll address how fast below.

2. It's a bit mechanical. It's just at a constant speed and there's no weight to the walk. He's just kinda floating.
Also, there needs to be a bobbing up and down movement because he is lifting himself up with his legs and then falling back to earth.

3. As he goes up he needs to go slower because he is lifting himself of the ground and when he goes down he needs to go faster because he is dropping to the ground.
The speeds I usually have it at are 8 frames going up and 6 coming down.

I hope this helps!
Don't be discouraged! Walks are one of the hardest things to get right. You should see some of my earliest cycles. They were horrible! But as I practiced I got better.

I'm thinking of putting together a walk cycle tutorial. I think that would be helpful to people.

James

You've taken the first step in animation. Congratulations!

I guess you'll need some basic animation theory to improve your animation skills. I've used the excellent book "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams. I advice you to do the same.

I've done a walk cycle tutorial of a standard walk recently, see:
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 3149#33149



Of course, because the standard version of AS doesn't have onion skinning, you'll need to create a screenshot of the contact position, import that as an image layer underneath your animation, and create the down position using the screenshot as a guide. Then you create a screenshot of the down position. Now you can create the rest of your animation by using those two screenshots, and use layer translation to match them up with the next steps.

I know it's a bit more work, but you should be able to create similar results as with the Pro version of AS.

As spoooze! has indicated the main problem is the hips.

If the hips are the parent of the skeleton they should control the up and down motion.

The hips in your clip never change height. They should bob up an down during the walk cycle. Depending on the type of walk and the speed, this up and down would be subtle but it needs to be there. The lack of hip motion is what gives it a mechanical feel... in my opinion.

-vern

Perhaps a good exercise would be to do a bouncing ball that mimics a walking person.



This would represent a normal bouncing ball, trying to imitate a walking person. This can be done with point motion, and is pure animation, no special drawing skills needed. I have used point translation and point scaling with preserve volume (hold the Alt key while stretching up and down).

Now make it a ball filled with water, filled with helium, a happy walk, a sad walk, make it stop in the middle, and then continue. You can learn a lot from these kinds of experiments, and have a lot of fun, especially if you create a soundtrack with your own voice to guide your animation with sound effects. Don't publish that, keep it for yourself.

I do use the animators survival kit... Im just having a hard time getting the hips right so that was my rough version basically.