Research
Overall
For this assignment, I put together a youtube playlist to compile all the videos that I referenced and used while working on this module. These videos really helped me understand just how much personality and emotion can be shown through something as simple as a walk or run cycle that I wouldn’t have really considered before.
Walk Cycles
As I was still a little unfamiliar with how walk cycles worked, I decided to look up some tutorials online to help break down the steps for me and learn some tips.
The first video that I checked out was Doodleys video on animating legs. I found this video quite helpful in understanding how weight plays an important role in walk cycles, characters can look uncanny and floaty if weight is not portrayed correctly.
Doodleys video really helped break down the walk cycle workflow in a way that was easy for me to digest and follow. The visualisation of each step made understanding how balance plays a key role in how most of the body operates while performing a walk cycle really easy to follow along with.
Another resource that I found that really helped me understand how walk cycles worked was a blog post by “Iwanttobeananimator” that broke down each part of their walk cycle . They detailed parts that I would have maybe overlooked if I hadn’t read their post, like the chest bounce and posing the feet on the same line (X). Reading this blog post really helped make things click as I had been struggling to understand how the hips and chest swayed on each step.
Another video that I found quite interesting was the “The Golden Walk Cycle – Inertia Method” by Matt Drummond. It broke down each step of the walk cycle but used maths to determine how each part should be timed and made. I had thought about trying this method myself but I wasn’t sure I understood it very well and I am incredibly bad at anything involving mathematics.
Run Cycles
Research on run cycles was a little bit harder for me to find, especially for the personality run cycle. I ended up finding a few references that were helpful in breaking down the key poses but I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing out on some important information and that I lack the proper understanding of how a run cycle works.
Most videos I found for personality run cycles were mainly on running scared which I wasn’t too fond of making as the pose didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to showcase my understanding of how the body works in a run cycle and I felt that having the arms outstretched for the entirety of it wouldn’t showcase it that well.
The couple references that I found extremely useful for run cycles were the Preston Blair animation guides on various ways to walk and run. These references laid out each pose for various different walk cycles and runs with recommended timing to use with them. I found these references quite useful and they helped me figure out which personality run I wanted to animate ( a skip). I found that slowed down footage of people running also helped me understand how the body moves when running and I feel like I knew when to make the body bob up and down when creating my own thanks to them.
Animating, Roadblocks & Final Results
Vanilla walk cycle
The vanilla walk cycle was the first animation that I attempted to do. I had found it easy enough to understand when attending Rachel’s talk, but once I had gotten home and tried to animate one for the assignment; I had found that my forms and timing looked quite off in comparison to others that I had seen. I realised that I wasn’t really understanding how weight was contributing to the key poses, but once I watched Doodley’s video on walk cycles and weight, I started to understand a bit better. I still struggled with getting my timing right but I felt like I understood a little bit more about the walk cycle positions and what they should look like.
For my reference, I used a “Pixar Walk Cycle” by Arakon N. I felt that this was a nice natural walk cycle that had good arcs and would be fun to replicate. I don’t think I managed to get the arcs good, in fact I think the arms are something that I will need to work on more regarding my walk cycles, but I’m happy with how it came out.
When showing my animation to others, they commented on how it looked quite stuttery and that the looping looked a little off. One friend recommended moving a frame or so forward to see if that would work.
Unfortunately due to health issues and time restraints I was unable to make these changes in time.
Personality / Character Walk Cycle
The personality walk cycle was quite fun to animate as I had a pretty helpful reference (I Want To Be An Animator Blog) that was handy to read on up when I was stuck. I did run into a few problems when trying to on 2’s when working on my run cycle so for this animation I had decided to animate on 1’s to circumvent this, however this came with its own can of worms. Due to how I chose to animate the walk cycle, it came out looking extremely jittery and stuttery. I had later learned from a friend that I could’ve used fewer keyframes for better results had I used the graph editor but I was extremely intimidated by the graph editor as I didn’t quite understand how it worked. Upon finishing my animation, a friend broke down how the graph editor worked in a way that I finally understood which I will be using to my advantage in future animations.
When showing others this animation, I was told that the animation was extremely stuttery and had some weird twitches on the arms and legs.Unfortunately due to health issues and time restraints I was unable to make these changes in time.
Vanilla Run Cycle
The vanilla run cycle was the second animation that I attempted. I used the images that Alec linked on Blackboard for reference when animating as I felt that it showcased the key poses in a way that was easy for me to understand. I still struggled with the timing on this animation but due to time limitations, I was not able to practise my timings properly.
I had repeated this animation quite a lot as I kept running into a strange problem where certain limbs would start freaking out despite not being keyframed as such. I later realised when working on a different animation that this might have been caused by messing up my rotations when animating (animating the wrong way despite ending up in the right position, this would make it hard for the program to interpolate properly causing my issue).
When showing off this animation, I received comments that the ponytail was posed rather weirdly and that it needed to be more fluid and wavy to not stand out as much. It was also suggested that I bend the characters back and chest more rather than the neck as it made the pose rather awkward and the neck rotation was quite extreme in comparison to the rest of the body.
Unfortunately due to health issues and time restraints I was unable to make these changes in time.
run with personality / character
I found myself struggling a lot with finding references for this prompt and understanding what “running with personality” really meant. Originally, I had thought it was just a unique or interesting run cycle, but when asked “what emotion is the character portraying?” when presenting my ideas and blockouts; I was stumped. It took me a while to understand what this meant but I think by the end I understood.
I had originally planned to reference the run cycle of “Jack ‘O Valentine” from the “Guilty Gear” series as I have always admired their stylistic animations, and had blocked out some of the animation for it. However I realised that there wasn’t really any emotion that was being conveyed, it was just really nice to look at. I ended up scrapping this idea and instead decided upon a cheerful skip, using a reference video of Zoe from “League of Legends” to guide myself. I felt that this run cycle conveyed a happy-go-lucky personality and an overall cheerful mood.
When I showed my animation to some friends, they suggested that I curl the back leg more and make the front leg more fluid with how it raises and lowers as it was rather stiff and the hold on the frame was too noticeable. Unfortunately due to health issues and time restraints I was unable to make these changes in time.
I overall enjoyed animating this run the most as I felt that I was learning a lot more and that it really showed in the end result.
Reflection
Overall I found this assignment quite stressful as I have been experiencing some health related issues that made working rather difficult. Despite that, I had fun learning about how to inject personality into characters with walk/run cycles and after a while it became quite calming to keyframe the poses while listening to podcasts. I definitely learned where my issues and weaknesses are when completing this assignment and have made note to work on these in the upcoming months. I had tried my best to avoid the graph editor to my own detriment as I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it, this ended up making my animations look unpolished and rushed. It also made working on the animations take much longer as I was manually keyframing most things instead of letting the program interpolate the inbetween frames.
Something that I plan to keep in mind for my next assignments is to not waste so much time animating and then scraping it to animate it again as it was not how I wanted. This hindered me as when I then fell sick as I had so many unfinished files and not many finished ones that would cause me to fall behind further.
I would also like to begin annotating and taking notes on Youtube videos that I find helpful regarding animation as I find myself being able to remember something useful shortly after I’ve read or watched it, but then end up forgetting it and not incorporating it into my workflow / approach.
References
Youtube Playlist – https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnBUTR6tcVkZb8DW9Und48VnL17f-rqFV&si=DOxMoz1qL02O8z77
Doodley – https://youtu.be/6lGPvMLE8Oo?si=LfkUCElkzKdNv6OW
I want to be an Animator Blog – https://iwanttobeananimator.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/tutorial-2/
I want to be an Animator Feminine Walk reference – https://youtu.be/J-X_WBocoYQ?si=zsUY0PJt2YYZ_cpU
Pixar Walk Cycle – https://youtu.be/1Wk339c-lPg?si=XYEU7csT9reHnjhn
Zoe Reference – https://youtu.be/578eRavIbQk?si=g5FcTu5YjMV9DOvW