I started to gather some resources on what makes a good animation, and some step-by-step key poses needed to make the animation look natural and realistic. I wanted to get the basics down first so looked at the walk cycle break down found in ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’. Its example breaks down the different poses needed to create a natural looking walk/run cycle. There were also some examples of more exaggerated walk/run cycles that add a lot more character and life to them. For my animations I’d really like to give personality to my character and see how far I can push the final result. I also gathered some videos that could be good reference for my animations.
YouTube videos I found helpful or could be useful for my animations.
Over these past few weeks, I’ve been focusing mostly on catching up on the group 3D Environment assignment since I had started falling behind on this. But I did come up with a character design sheet for my animations, sketching out the proportions I wanted them to have.
I simplified the proportions of my character and gave them a slightly anime inspired style. I wanted to give them clothes that I thought could add some nice secondary movements to the animation. For example, the long sleeves gives the opportunity for drag and follow through and the big zipper can add some smaller, dynamic movements. I also have an example of a previous animation I did for fun, that has really fluid movements in the clothes that I could maybe incorporate into this character, especially within their clothes animation.
During the past few weeks, we did some more 2D practices for the run cycles. The first exercise was to fill in a few in-betweens of a simple run animation. It took me a little bit to figure out what needed fixed, but I got there in the end. We were then asked to make our own variation of the same run cycle. I wanted to add a bit of personality to mine so made the legs move slower and drag along with the character and hunched the back to make them look tired from running. I also added some sweat running off their head to exaggerate the exhaustion from the character.
My version:
A few more weeks passed, and I hadn’t made any progress with my 2D animation, or even starting it yet. At this point of the semester, I started to fall behind, trying to catch up with the 3D environment again and started to feel quite stressed. I decided to scrap my original plan of doing a 2D animation and instead switched to 3D. This would save me time as, the rigs are quicker to move and adjust than frame to frame 2D animation. I do feel quite upset with myself as, I really did want to do 2D this semester but since I hadn’t done the summer exercises, I realistically don’t think I can get 3 sets of animations done in time.