character walk cycle 3

This time to try and make life easier, i stuck to doing the keyframes, just to see how a stomp would look.
again consistency with volume is an issue but not as bad the previous, i made her a bit older deliberate so that her legs would be longer, therefore easier to work with.

character walking cycle 1

so now i have more of an idea how i want  my character to move, and her appearance, i was hoping the walk cycle would be a bit more straight forward.
However i found that i had restricted my characters movements while trying to exaggerate them, which of course doesn't really work.
Here is the first half of one step, at 15fps.

The little girl has welly boots and is traipsing through the mud. it was pointed out to me the movements were not yet exaggerated enough and when marching trough mud, the character should be more aware of the steps they're taking.
and just general consistency errors, for example the right leg stretching and instead of looking like the character move up on the high step, the head kind of grows. Therefore it would probably be a good idea to consider starting it again.

character design walk cycle 1

We've been set our new brief, which is the character walk and ball bounce exercise, which has to range from 20-30 seconds long, with a series of other objects and environments to interact with.

Here is the first walk cycle of my character design. I did this so i could see how the level of detail looked while doing something as simple as walking.

Ok, While this is probably my best walk cycle yet, the characters design is all over the place and throughout the walk is inconsistent.  the best part of this is probably the legs the rest demonstrate that perhaps i need to go back to design level, and simplify my character further, or even move  away from a character thats is this human.

lip synching

We've moved on to the lip synching exercise. I have to say I'm quite looking forward to it!
So, first we were given a sound bite to animate to but first of all we needed a character.  Onto Designing!

 

I have no intention of animating this much detail at the moment, it would take too long and be too difficult to keep consistency, Therefore I had to simplify it, which also meant adding expressions and mouth shapes which we would relate to sounding vowels and continuances.

I’m planning to use the first half of the sound bite bite, but it had to make sense, as there are two separate voices and I have only one character, so, I gave her a hand puppet.

I think this design will be my testing character, so she has no personality except the ones I need for learning and testing techniques for animation.

I’m finding the squash and stretch idea difficult to apply to her, but that’s also to so with where to place the mouth for which emotion while remaining in line with the jaw. I have found myself referring to "the animation survival kit" by Richard William because it has a really helpful; section on mouth movements and shapes in relations to words and how they sound. So far I have only just started making the frames for line test. Lots of work to do!

walk cycle 3

So today I had another attempt at the walk cycle before moving on to lip-syncing. The arm movement here is ridiculously erratic and makes no sense, but I am much happier with the leg movement and how much more smoothly it flows.

Unfortunately the poor arm movement takes away completely from the rest of the movement and my frustration with the walk cycle is much more obvious here. Also I think I've paid to little attention to the arms and underestimated their importance of making the walk look believable.

Overall I think this one is the better out of the others, mainly because I new what I was doing and had found a book which was helpful. I referenced most in-between frames from the book “the Animators reference book” this book consists of small photos of people in different movement positions, which I found it immensely helpful.

I would like to revisit this particular walking man, and make it neater, apply a design to it and ad more character to the walk but for now I think it’s time to move on, otherwise I will eave myself no time for lip syncing.

animation, walk cycle

OK, so today was about creating a successful walk cycle, which I had two attempts at, but they both desire improvement. The video bellow is a line test and my first attempt at a walk cycle, consisting of 12 frames, I had misunderstood the process a little, maintaining mass was a little difficult, overall not that good.

Below is my second attempt and second line test, which has 21 frames. At this point I understood how to co-ordinate my frames while drawing them, which was confusing as I kept loosing track which frame went where.

There is a fair few point to improve on. For starters, I was so focused on the getting the in-between movements on the legs correct I completely neglected the movement of the arms, which will be something to consider on my next attempt. Again, change in mass is an issue, but this is more noticeable in the head, which I think over time and with practice this mistake will happen less often. The bad arm movement really is the downfall of this, so I will simply have to try again until I do it correctly, when I can do this sequence well I would like to apply a design to it, that will make it more fun to do I think.
While an animation like this would usually be at 12 fps, I brought it lower because 12 fps made the movement too quick therefore looked unnatural. When I brought it down to 8 fps and the speed was more believable.