Study in Emotion
This week I decided to start working on my second animation which was a study in conveying emotion. For this study I decided to animate a sad walking cycle and used my basic 2D animation as a reference while I was animating in Maya.
Version 1
This first version of my animation is very basic, as I was mainly focused on making the key frames. The walk cycle itself is fine, however it currently does not convey any emotion. I plan to exaggerate the movements by making each step feel heavier. I also plan to make the character hunch over some more to make it look as if they are looking down to the ground as they walk, to try and show that they’re feeling sad. I will also need to edit the timeline as the character should be much slower to convey that they are feeling sad. I plan to make the character lift their legs slowly, to try and create anticipation with each step.
Version 2
In this version I made some changes so that my character clearly conveys emotion. In this version I made the character lean down even more after taking each step to try and exaggerate their movements. I also slowed down the animation so that the character is walking at a much slower pace. I think these changes have already made a big improvement as I believe that it makes it more obvious that the character is sad. However, this version has some big flaws in it as well. The walk cycle isn’t very smooth as during certain frames the character’s legs will jump forwards/backwards, which ruins the flow of the cycle. There are also times when the character’s feet go through the grid, which I’m not happy with. I plan to fix these mistakes in order to make my animation flow more smoothly.
Although certain parts took a couple attempts to get right, I believe that I made some good progress I made this week. I think my character does a good job so far at conveying emotion, however I do plan to add some more improvements. My main aim for next week is to fix the mistakes during the walking cycle, so that my animation flows smoothly again.