After I finished The basic Walk, I then focused on developing my basic run cycle. As I had done with the walk cycle before, my main point of reference for developing my run cycle was specifically from of Richard William’s “Animator’s Survival Kit” (Williams, R. (2001)) From my past attempts of Walk cycles, I thought creating a run cycle would be quite difficult but I found the development of a Run cycle is actually less labor-intensive. Reasoning being is that although the number of keyframes is now Seven rather than Five, unlike walk cycles which usually require a set of in-between frames to slow down the motion. Typically making the motion as fast as possible is the aim for creating Run cycles, so unlike my basic walk cycle which required to be animated on twos along with having a full set of in-between frames to get the correct pace, my run cycle was developed by animating it on ones and only containing the key frames in order to get the timing right.

Overall, I found understanding the basic key-frames of a run cycle a bit more difficult compared to walk cycles as it relies on all keyframes being plotted correctly in order to create a smooth motion as opposed to relying on in-between frames to create a smoother animation like with walk cycles but I’m sure this is only due to this being my first proper attempt at a run cycle and I was purely using my experience from developing a walk cycle along with the key frame referencing from Williams’ Animator Survival Kit.

Another aspect that needed to be adjusted with my run was differentiating the movement of the left and right legs from each other to make the run cycle look less mechanical and mirrored when moving back and forth. To counter this, I decided to adjust the two contact poses to be stretched at different lengths for each side to differentiate them a bit and I found this helped my final result. You can see the progression of my final basic run cycle from reference to initial sketches to the finished animation below.

 

 

 

Williams, R. (2001). The animator’s survival kit. (Pg:177) London: Faber And Faber.

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