For my third walk cycle I decided to time something to music like how Tabasi how done in his loops:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en

This was my last walk and was due in two weeks so I didn’t plan this one quite as much as the others since I needed to hit the ground running with this. I came up with the idea of a groovy robot with big rubbery arms and sketched it out in my notebook. I decided to go with the taller bottom design as it would allow me incorporate more hip movements.The next problem was finding a beat I could animate too. I wasn’t too sure where to begin since looking at the stuff Tabasi had done, he seemed to have gotten a friend to create specific music to use since he sells them as NFTs. I decided to start searching through royalty free jingles on YouTube until I found this:

It was funky and had a clear beat I thought I could animate to. I took the audio into Premiere Pro and cut it down further to around a 8 sec clip.

From there I took it into Harmony and tried to match the contact poses of the walk to the beat. I decided to use just 2 seconds of the clip I made.

Since I wanted to explore displacing the weight via the hips and shoulders, I had a look back through William’s Surivival Kit and found this section:

This gave me a really good guide for how handle the weight during the walk.

I had to time the walk out on threes in order to match the beat of the music which gave it something of a rather clunky movement. I don’t really like walks being done on threes, personally I feel it’s too slow and unatural but it allowed me more space to work with the arms. The walk at this stage I felt was very dull. I decided not to do the speaker on the chest, since it wouldn’t really add much and chose to spin the whole up body not just the hat.

Before I started a did a quick sketch of the torso spin in my notebook to help me figure the movement out. Working on threes actually helped me here since I had more timing to play around with for the torso. I started planning how many poses it would take to spin the torso and how many frames I had before the robot returned to his next down pose.

Rather than start spinning the whole body at once I broke it down into sections and started with the torso first, since it would set the speed for the head and arms. This gave me the idea to then break the body apart as he walks, letting the torso hang in the air as it spins.

I liked the spin, I felt it helped give the walk that extra flair it was missing. I also used some of the foreshortening techniques I had learned from my first biped walk to help polish the end of the arm spin. I choose to exaggerated the up and down pose to help set the spin up more and give it that extra punch on the down.

You’ll struggle to see this in the gif but my first pass on seperating the head and body out involved having the head and torso seperate twice before I decided it didn’t look as good and actual subtracted from the second seperation, so stuck with just one.

Below is my final version of the walk repeated in video for ease.

In reflection there were elements of this walk I was happy with. I liked the spin, I thought it was timed nicely to the beat of the music and liked the weight displacement in the shoulders and hips, although I probably could have pushed it a little further in some parts. There was also a certain something in the way the character was drawn that looked increasingly off to me. I wasn’t sure if it was the repeating internal lines on the arms and legs that was causing strange tangents or busy-ness when they overlapped on the passing poses, or if it was the thickness of my lines.

Looking at it now I think it’s the arms become lost in the staging of the passing pose, so I’m left with an unclear silhouette. Adding some colour to help differentiate between arms and legs might have worked. If I was to do it again I think I would stage the character a bit better to allow me to seperate the body further and go higher on the up poses and clean up the silhouette.

With my plan of making a 2D rig shelved I began to plough head first into my walk cycles.

I had found an animator on Instagram a while back called Hadi Tabasi, whose work I absolutely loved. He had created a series of looping animations set to music. This inspired me to create something similar, focusing on creating somehting that was hypnotic and mesmerising to watch on repeat.

I also took inspiration from Jack Foley, a previous students walk cycle and a few looping run cycles I had found online.

My intention was never to produce something as finished, instead I wanted to focus on creating something that had really nice arcs, smooth animation and was a pleasing loop. I wanted to create three walks, each exploring a different aspect of walks, a biped walk which focused on loops, a quadraped walk and a walk timed to music.

Biped Walk 1

I first started out by trying to animate my own little wolf man character based on my discord profile pic.

I got through three poses of the walk cycle before deciding it looked awful.

Absolutely hideous.

I quickly scrapped the character and started a new.

With my new character I kept the designs simple and based around shapes I could easily animate. As I was designing him I also worked out how his body would rotate from side to side with each step.

I went back again to Richard William’s and had a look in his section about improving upon base walks.

I used this approach to inform myself of how to handle and displace the weight of the character as he was walking. I started by using a basic walk cycle with some added tilt. Since I knew arcs were what allowed an animation to produce that hypnotic effect I paid close attention to the arcs of his head tilt.

Then I pushed the tilt more extreme in my up and down poses, speed up the timing and added some squash. The tweaks gave the walk a nice sense of vitality and weight. Once I was comfortable with the timing and arcs in the walk I started on the arms. With the arms, again I wanted those nice arcs but also more 3D depth.

My inital attempt involved his arms swing back and forward but also out towards the camera. Needless to say it did not work, and looked bloody awful. I then attempt another approach where his arm bent around his body and swing out back towards the camera.

I wasn’t quite happy with the back swing, then I remembered reading a similar section in William’s Survival Kit and found some inspiration for a better way to handle the arms. I also had a look at the William’s advice for adding more flexibilty by breaking the elbows. I decided against this since it didn’t really fit my walk took not of the application for the characters wrists.

I added a slight bit of foreshortening in his arms and started incorporating a greater flexibility in his wrists.

  I then decided to mimic the foreshortening effect I had with the front swing on the back swing as well.

Once I had the left arm done it was pretty straight forward to replicate the same effect for the right arm.

I was really happy with the final outcome of this walk. I felt it had all the elements I wanted, nice arcs, smooth animations and a hypnotic effect to the movements. The only thing I think I would change would be to have animated the tie more.

Quadraped Walk

For my next walk Sarah suggested I try a quadraped walk since I hadn’t tried one before. I also wanted to do something trippy too, so one night before bed I sketched out this weird little dude.

The plan was everytime he took a step the heads on his feet would scream and his actual head would spin in a 360 while the tail made little fists.

Before I started I looked again at William’s guide for doing quadraped walks and decided to do a test before starting the real thing.

Using the guide for a dog I produced this:

Truthfully, I thought it was an okay for a first attempt. I didn’t bother with the head since I was focusing on the posing, weight and the timing. After having the finished the walk test I realised the dog anatomy wouldn’t quite work with the monster I designed. Specifically the placement of the head feet.

I took a look at a few skeletons of horses and deer to give me a better understanding of how the body would move and the joints would bend.

Scientific illustration: horse skeleton – Isolated on sky blue

I then had a look at a few examples of a horse walking.

I then discovered that Williams had actually gone through a horses walk cycle in the extended edition of his survival kit.

This was a lot of help since it was easier to work out the ups and downs for both the back and front legs. I started by working on his the back legs first. I had spoke to my co-worker Daryl earlier about my plans and he pointed out it would actually make more sense to have the feet screaming when they’re in the air and having the mouths closes while they’re in the contact and down pose.I thought it turned out okay. I decided to turn the left head away from the camera since it would make the walk too busy and probably hard to make out what was going on.

I then move onto the front legs. To save time, I reused the feet head from the back legs and simply flipped them.

I then combined the back and front legs together and started planning out the head.

I drew out a rough guide to help myself plan the turning of the eyes on the head. 

I had a bit of trouble trying to work how the original mouth would work in it’s rotation. It was round about here I realised the timing in my head spin was off and wouldn’t actually complete an entire 360 turn but was instead only doing a 180. I decided so simple replicate the same mouth design on both sides since it would then form a complete loop, it also took up less space than the original mouth.ghWith the head sorted I moved onto the tail. I was a little unsure on how to manage the hand design while it was making a fist so I had a look online and found a hand guide for Looney Tunes that I liked the look of.

The hand would move in lieu of a regular tail, after I finished I wasn’t too sure if it looked too small and appeared like it was moving under it’s own initiative rather than reacting to the motion of the back legs. Part of this I think was due to the placement of the tail being higher up than it would be naturally.I sent this on to Sarah after I finished it and she pointed out the timing on each body part was too even. I wasn’t sure how I’d done that since I was following William’s guide but it must be caused by the head spin, which probably needs to be faster. I seem to have a recuring problem of making my timing too even with my animations. Sadly I didn’t have enough time to implement these changes since I still had another walk cycle left to do, but if I did it again I’d speed the head spin up until it was able to do a full 360.

In conclusion I think the walk turned out okay. I liked how the feet turned out, especially the expressions and squash of heads but the tail is a little lackluster, although I like the fist clench. But the head has a bit too much negative space in it for my liking now the larger mouth was replaced. But overall it was a decent attempt for my second quadraped walk cycle, espeically since i had added such absurd elements.

For my Major Project I started off upskilling myself with rigging in Toon Boom. I’d done rigging in the past with After Effects so I had a general grasp of rigging in 2D. Sarah recommended, to speed up the process, I take a previously designed character and rig them. Since I’d just finished my pitch bible I decided to use my main character Jill and rig her.

I’d started a new role at the Univeristy, which was going to eat up a lot my attention. So to save myself more time and since I was only concerned with learning the process behind rigging in Harmony, rather than producing a world class rig, I aimed to create a 90 degree rig for Jill, not a whole 360.

I started by looking at Harmony’s own resources for rigging:

Adding Constraints to a Rig | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 1 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 2 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 3 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

How to Rig a Cut-out Character

Although the websites were a bit of mess and were missing some vital video tutorials, so I had to cromb through their youtube to find them.

Using the Harmony tutorials the first step was creating the layers for a blank rig.

I didn’t find this terribly useful, since it was more ground work than actually getting stuck into the nitty gritty and I already understood rig heriarchy from After effects. Eventually I moved onto creating the assets for the rig, which you do from scratch in Harmony itself rather than importing the drawings from another software. Again, the original tutorials from Harmony here were not the best. They explained the process but half way through I discovered they were showing me a method that was more time consuming rather than productive. Leading me through one side of the process, then returning to do the other half instead of doing them simultaneously. Eventually I pivoted to using a combination of the Harmony tutorials and live streams from other riggers showing me their process, Kyu-Bum Lee was especially helpful in this regard.

Along the way I gathered a variety of shorcuts, advice and off-hand reminders for myself which I could reference back to for future use.

I began working on building my rig in Harmony, which was a realtively straightforward process of tracing my designs.

The next step was going through my node libary and cleaning it up. taking it from this:

To this:

It wasn’t stricly nessecary to do this, this early but I found it easier to make sense of the mess of nodes this way. One of the biggest issues I encountered was the hair in my character. It was a nightmare. I was struggling with the design and how to deal with all the interlocking strands and getting them to intercut into eachother. I found this tutorial online which I felt was really helpful.

But once I had solved this issue I realised I had an even greater problem with how I was going to manage the hair when she was turning. Elements that were in the back were going to need to be the front and vice versa. It was also around this time that my new Univeristy post started eating up more of my time and I decided to make a decision.

Knowing I’d need to crunch my MA over the Christmas holiday I chose to pivot my major project from Toon Boom rigging to a series of walk cycles.

My reasoning behind this was four fold:

I was faster animating than rigging, I enjoyed animating more and since I was going to need to crunch I had a higher chance of finishing it if I enjoyed it, I had a solid enough foundation now for Harmony rigging and lastly, I knew I could produce stronger animations than rigs. So I choose to leave my rigging and move onto walk cycles.

For the second part of our part of our major project we were directed to create a CV and showreel. For students this a requirement to step into the industry, thankfully I didn’t have that same issue but it was a nice chance for me to punch up my old CV and showreel.

CV

My old CV was very basic, having previously overdesigned a CV while I was in my undergraduate I had sought to keep my working CV basic and easy to update with new work experience.

It’s not really an attractive CV by any regards. It’s a very basic design and kinda ugly, so I was keen to have another go at it but one thing that I wanted to maintain was that employer’s had found the layout easy to read and navigate.

When it came to gather reference for redesigning I was lucky enough to have a slew of examples from our previous students to start with. I had a clear idea in my head what kind of style I wanted, something that looked professtional, wasn’t overly cutesy or cartoony and had a general mininalist approach.

I liked these examples by previous students but was aware that they getting a little incestuous with their design motifs so I wanted to explore further and avoid making mine too similar.

The main take away I got from these examples was petite type size, bold headers with clear sections. a white background with black type and a splash of colour for personality.

I really liked the yellow colour off the examples I had found and was keen to move on from the bland cyan I had been using before. Yellow is apparently the first colour the human eye sees and I felt it had a lively energy to it, which matched my personality.

I sketched out a rough layout in Photoshop before I starting.I made sure to leave an even spacing around the border and broke up each section into it’s own respectable area. From here it was just a straight forward but time consuming process of finding a typeface I could work with. Thankfully Henry reconmended I check out the fonts from Adobe’s own database, which made things a look more faster. I decided to settle on Rig Sans by Jamie Clarke since it had that professtional vibe I sought but also had a large selection of different font styles I could work with, which was useful for breaking up sections.

With my font chosen and my layout down I started work on my first pass.

I was really happy with how quickly it came together and pretty pleased with the inital result. I was unsure about including a photo my myself, there’s always so much differenting opinion on whether or not you should include a photo but I felt it humanises the CV more to me. I showed it to Henry and Sarah and got this feedback:

• Make the background an off white/grey rather than a straight white.
• Align the text to centre.
• Remove the yellow lines behind the about me section.
• Rearrange my refence section to they were spaced more vertical.

With that done, this was my final version:

I’m really pleased with how this turned out in the end. It looked a lot better than my previous CV and had all the design motifs I was going for, minimalist, professtional, easy to read/navigate and with just the right splash of personality to avoid it being boring.

SHOWREEL

My next assignment was to create a showreel. At the time I didn’t realise I could have done an optional portfolio, but since I already have an online portfolio, (here) I figured an showreel would allow me stretch my video editing skills and give me something different to work with, plus I haven’t updated my personal showreel in over 10 years.

I’ve done several showreels for student year groups throughout my time at Ulster so it wasn’t really too difficult to repeat the process myself but I decided to have a look at a few showreels from studios I liked and some random artists I found.

A lot of the showreels I looked at had very chill music tracks to them, but with very noticable beats to them. This matched the advice we would give our students and which I’d been given myself, pick a track with a beat and edit your cuts to it.
I wanted a track which could build to a crescendo and had a reasonably fast beat since it would allow me enough oppitunity to fit enough cuts in.

After many, many, many hours of searching through royalty free tracks on YouTube I finally found one I liked.

I also wanted to make sure I book ended my showreel with my name and contact info and tied the style of the title cards back into my CV, to make it a more cohesive branding. I had originally wanted to put an animated paper texture behind my title card but Henry talked me out of it since it wouldn’t have matched my CV. My showreel was a combination of backgrounds, prop design and animation I’d done between my MA and my time in the industry. When I showed my original version to Sarah, she simply reconmended that I add text to explain which parts of my showreel I had actually worked on since it was so eclectic.

I was pretty happy with my final version of my showreel. I think having more shots of my backgrounds in the actual animations makes it more interesting to watch, at least from a showreel perspective. I think the energy of the showreel works well and I feel I’ve edited the footage nicely to the beats of the music, especially matching the frantic footage with more intense beats. Overall, I’m pleased with both results, I think my new CV is a vast improvement over the old and my new showreel is well edited and enaging to watch.