3D
At the start of this tutorial, we had a warm-up to make more sense of the graph editor, and I found it really, really helped me to understand how to use it, what the different settings on it mean, what their effects are, and how to utilise it.
Doing this really helped me to better understand the graph editor, and I think it really helped as I went on to attempt the run cycle in blender, which I’m really happy with as two weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to achieve something as fluid as this in blender, but I’m quite pleased with myself!
Animating this was quite enjoyable; I did encounter a few issues though. Part way during the animation, my leading leg would randomly jolt out on frame 12. I’m not sure what caused this issue; I just manually reset all the numbers in the transform menu, and it seemed to fix the issue.
2D
For our 2D run, we were once again using the Richard Williams guide. I have never done a run cycle before, so this was a good way to get introduced to the basics of it.
This is what I got done in class, and I’m pretty happy with it. I think I’m getting much better at animating on ToonBoom; it’s starting to come a lot easier to me. I’m unsure whether or not for my final animation I want to use Preston Blair’s approach or Richard Williams, but I am going to use a real-life reference to help guide me from the channels recommended to use my Aodhan and Rachel.
Aodhan gave me some feedback in class that it could be better to leave the hands as fists instead of having them open up, and this is what I will do for my final animation. I thought having the hand open up would be cool, but it just looks a little distracting, and my proportions are quite messed up. Some parts of the body get bigger and then get smaller, so when doing any of my final animations, I need to really up my consistency because it is an issue I’ve noticed in a lot of my animations so far.
Taking on Aodhan’s feedback, this is the final animation I’ve come out with:
I’m really happy with my finished run cycle; the sketchy lines are working a lot better for me! I can see an improvement here from my walk cycle.
There are a few things I would change though.
I feel the run is a bit slow and could use a few less inbetweens; this might make it faster and less laggy. The torso is also a bit jittery; it was more jittery than this, but I tried to fix that.
Overall, I’m really, really happy with this. I think it’s a definite improvement from where I started, and hopefully I’ll continue to improve more.