Walk cycles are a fundamental skill for animators, it allows us to build on the 12 principles that we covered last year, and translate these into a moving character. Although I got a bit of practice on them during Summer, I was still pretty nervous starting this module.
Walk Cycles
What is a walk? Walking is just the act of repeatedly catching yourself from falling.
To create a successful walk we need to be able to capture the idea of weight shifting from foot to foot, we want clean arcs where our body parts move and think about placing our 2D character in a 3D space.
We can take a look at both Richard Williams’ and Preston Blair’s key poses of a walk, and use these as a foundation to build any walk we want to create. Using these directly will create a boring but functional walk.
Another resource I found was from Doodley. Although he works in 3D all of what he covers is still valuable for 2D work, he covers how and why the body moves when you walk. I found this really useful as he covers aspects like how the hips and shoulders move, counter-balance, etc. I think understanding body mechanics really helps, so that you know what you can exaggerate/stylise but still be functionally possible for your particular character.
Learning all of this, I went ahead and created my first walk cycle of the semester. I start off using a basic form to animate the character’s main movements, before adding on other elements for secondary action. The main mistake I had here was rushing into animation when adding in secondary actions, you can see the amount of changes I went through to work on these. Things like checking the arc on my hats movements, or in this case the disregard of an arc, was really telling for why this movement was so jarring. The most important lesson I learnt from this was that rushing into animation is a big mistake, I should spend more time thinking and finding reference before I start to draw.
I wanted to do some research on animated walk cycles, to see how they captured not only personality through the walk, but also how they used design to add interesting secondary action and add personality/life to the characters.
Bridget’s walk is a good demonstration of a laid back and cheerful one, she has these really slow steps that swing her foot in on contact that makes her look like she’s gliding almost. She bobs her head along with her body movement as well has moving her arm independently to a beat that we can’t hear. She even has a yoyo that she walks like a dog, creating this whimsical and fun loving tone.
This is an example from past pupil Jack Foley, he was able to incorporate a lot of interesting design elements which I have highlighted below. These are all small components that are able to give us an insight to the character as a whole through just them walking. All of this movement is very simple but effective.
Run Cycles
What is running? Walking but faster!
We have to keep in mind the same principles of grasping weight and build on this by capturing energy by adding in one more pose to push the body up and making sure that at one point we have both legs in the air. Then we also have to think of how fast our character is going, and this is reflected in how much lean our character has, how much arm/chest movement (and then making sure that we have enough frames to compensate the wilder actions). Runs are able to be really fun and experimental!
I wanted to practice the general keys from Richard Williams and Preston Blair, get a feeling for the movements of a run before I did more research so that I could understand what to look for better. I actually found this quite hard, with the faster movement I found myself losing a grasp on the arcs and a sense of flow.
I then went and looked at real references of runs, in comparison to the stylised charts, we have more restricted arm movement, the main action is happening with the legs which both come off the ground briefly and the body leans slightly forward. This is a casual run and lasts about 16 frames.
Then you can have a sprint, where we have a massive lean in the front of the body and the arms pump back and forth to generate this feeling of explosive energy but this isn’t something that can be maintained for long periods of time.
Then I had a look at how animators were able to create personality with the quicker movement and other limitations.
I looked at this more controlled run from Guilty Gear. It creates this angular silhouette and the feet make sharp contact with the ground, we get the idea that he is a very stable and solid character, and it leans into this anime style pose. There isn’t a lot of exaggerated movement, just some bobbing of the shoulders.
To contrast this I went and looked at a very stylised run, seen in Ragatha. This run is a lot more unstable, it has a lot of more side to side movement, the arms have a lot of movement to imply that they are made of cloth, and other secondary actions like the hair and dress supplement this wild movement. We could also infer that the wilder movements could show that she is panicked and thus running from something. This taught me that you want to sort out the context of the run before you start as this will affect how elements move and how the body will be positioned.