I had never animated a run cycle before so I was a little nervous about starting this.  Looking through various run cycles other people had created was very enjoyable though and I was able pick up from them the basic positioning of the feet which differed from the walk cycle I had just worked on – at one point I would need both feet to be off the ground.

I really liked the run in the last video with the character leaning forward to run faster.  This is definitely something I was interested in taking further.  I continued to look for more ideas and gather references however in case I found something else which I liked better.

The girl running with the baseball bat in this showreel looks amazing!  I wanted to try something similar to this – It has the leaning forward which I liked from the previous video with the addition of an item in the right hand.  I thought running with a sword would be interesting so I began looking for sword models and found this Genshin Impact one from Turbosquid.

I experimented with some other rigs to see if there was one that I liked more and thought would fit running with this sword.

I really liked the Stewart Rig by Animation Mentor, but it didn’t look right when I added the sword in so I opted for Joe Daniel’s Jill rig which worked very well.

This video was extremely helpful for watching before starting.  It breaks down the run cycle and shows you clear images of the keyframes needed to create the run cycle.  I kept referring back to this image to help me when I wasn’t sure of the next step:

It was very helpful to have this beside me as I was blocking out my main poses.

I positioned the sword slightly behind the character and wrapped the fingers around the handle using my own hand as reference to make sure I got the hand at the correct angle.

As I wanted to show the weight of the sword in the animation, I had it trailing behind the rest of the body as though slowing them down.  I also angled the chest and shoulder around to support the position of the arm as it would have looked unnatural.

Following along with my references, I blockout out the leg animation and used dope sheet to fix the timing until I was happy with the speed of the run.  This took many attempts – My previous attempt had looked more like a fast walk rather than a run, so this time I worked on exaggerating the height the legs were brought up so that it could be clearly seen.

Once I had animated the up and down movement to match each step, it was looking far better.  I quickly went through the graph editor making very minor changes to ensure the cycle was even and would look good.

I had a lot of bother trying to get the sword to stay in time with the hand… This was because I had went through and manually keyed each frame which then made the sword look as though it was being held very loosely.  After coming back to it with a fresh mindset the next day, I decided to removed all of these keyframes and parent the wrist to the sword which meant it would make moving everything far easier and give me a more clean result.

I began animating the arm movements, using the girl running with the bat as the reference for the left arm.  This arm moves up in front of her to balance out the lack of movement from the opposite side.  I wanted to make the arm look as though it was struggling/bounding from carrying the sword.  I think I managed to get this across quite well.

Upon showing this to my friend, one thing they pointed out was how the hips don’t move which makes her look odd.  I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed this before – Once it was pointed out it was very obvious.  Adding this small detail greatly improved the animation.

This was the result after fixing the right arm movement in the graph editor.

I’m very happy with how this turned out, however I think adding some more movement to the right arm would have made this better.