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.

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.