For this assignment, we focused on walk, run, and jump cycles. I was a little bit stressed about this as I find it difficult to create walk cycles and I do struggle with side profiles but I wanted to give it the best shot I could. I noticed I struggled with the height in a walk cycle at it’s highest and lowest point, the arm movement and also the position of the feet for example when the heel touches the floor, passes etc. (so basically everything :’)) when I done my first walk cycle for last year. I made sure to research more about them so I was comfortable; I first starting looking up ‘Walk cycles’ on Pinterest to get a general idea of how they should look as well as the basic poses.
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Research (Some are GIFs)
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Over summer, I attempted a few walk cycles just so I could try learn and reflect! I didn’t know how to loop either.
I also took down a few notes in class which I could look back on for some tips when it came to animating and what to remember.
Walk Cycle (3D)
First starting with the basic walk cycle, I wanted to do this one in 3D. I watched Rachel’s videos explaining how to create one in Blender and her image helped me a lot when creating mine. I also remember the Richard Williams book which breaks it down so I used that as reference too.
(Richard Williams, The Animators Survival Kit)
After blocking out the basic movements, I knew it wasn’t going to look fluid so I started watching a few videos to understand how to make it look better.
I feel like this one was easier to see how the body moves while walking as the body is kept fairly simple. I notice the movement for the chest/ shoulders the most in this video which was very helpful!
I like this video too as I think it’s easier to see the hip movement and it also helped me with the hands and hair.
This video would help me with the arm movement as I think it’s the most noticeable part about it! I mainly wanted to see how different weights would work.
These were also a few more videos I watched just to get the gist of the movement and how it should look in 3D.
I looked at my video references to understand how I would make the hands + arms move as well as the hair.
After this I was happy with where I was however, I noticed the legs were looking a bit clunky (?)
To try fix this, I changed how far I wanted the hip to sway side by side and it did seem to help a bit with it. I also made the movements leg exaggerated! I also realized that the last keyframe wasn’t hte exact same as the first one so it made it look weird and I lowered down one of the legs a tiny bit which helped.
After speaking to Rachel during the feedback session, I realised the reason that was causing my rig to look like that was that I broke the rig
slightly by making the hips go up too high! She showed me how to go about fixing it in class and also recommended me to change my frames a little; my frames weren’t even and were kind of over the place so I tried to fix them. I kept playing around with the rig to try fix it but I ended up confusing myself more so instead, I deleted most of the keyframes for the legs and re-animated them using Rachel’s videos! She also pointed out how to append my rigs for the different cycles into one file using the action editor which was really useful and I’m glad I learnt it!
Over the weekend, I sent Rachel a sketchfab link just to double check the walk cycle was looking good and she told me just to add a little movement in the chest and arms!
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Final Walk Cycle
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Walk Cycle with Personality (2D)
For the walks with personality, I wanted to try do 2D as it was something I struggled with and I thought it would let me develop skills with a normal walk cycle too! I was stuck between wanted my character to be shy or sassy. With how I came up with her, I thought the better fit would be to make my character seem shy! When we first found out our assignments, I liked videos on YouTube which I thought would be helpful throughout the year and it turns out we were provided those same videos, so I definitely picked the right ones!
I first designed my character and then I went into making her side profile. I didn’t want to make it too complicated as I know when using toon boom, moving about to get the limbs to look correct and fluid was the main focus first and then I could go in and clean up the walk cycle! I wanted to add a bag and glasses to my character so I tried to look up references where I could see how they would look from the side.
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Whilst blocking it out, I realized it looked more sad than I wanted it to, so I tried to fix it to make her look more shy. I decided to add her carrying books so that it would make her seem more shy. I was struggling a little adding books as I didn’t know how the hands would sit around it and I couldn’t find any specific references. I decided to take a photo of myself to try understand how the hands would sit.
When I got into toon boom, I made a basic walk cycle to give myself something to start with as I was struggling a little. I screenshotted parts of a timid walk cycle from a YouTube video and decided to try do the same poses with the legs. After this, I realised it was looking a little clunky so I tried to fix up some parts however, it was still rough just to get the gist of it.
I was still struggling a little as I didn’t really know how to deal with the legs as I wanted to make them look more slow. I tried to make them take up less room and I also tried to change the height of her bounce. I wrote down notes that I noticed from the walk however, when I tried it, it didn’t look too great and made her look angry.
I decided to take the video and cut it down even more, outlining how high the model goes so I could use that as a reference for my walk.
I tried getting it all level but it wasn’t really going the way I planned so I decided to just stick with the notes I had made. I was able to fix it a bit and then I realised, whenever my character was walking the hips looked strange so again, I tried fixing it. I also went to do the hair to get it to bounce more but I wasn’t sure how to make it look right so I looked on Pinterest for references. To make her look like she was walking slower, I decided to lower the fps to 12. For the personality walk cycle, Aodhan gave me feedback on syncsketch of what I needed to change for my character. One of the biggest things was adding more frames to make my character look more timid/ shy. One thing I realised after this feedback and looking at the reference video again was that the character needed to take up less space. Here is some feedback I got as well as the link to the sketchfab file!
I was struggling with the hair so I tried looking up references to see how it would move. I also looked at a few with the character’s hair down just to see how it would move.
(I understood with this one that her hair moves more because she is stomping rather than walking)
To try make her hair (and bag) match her being timid, I made it bounce less to make her seem a little less happy/ confident and sway less because her steps weren’t going to be as big with her being shy. I also tried to animate her arms and I kept reminding myself to do an arc however, it seemed like it was moving too much.
After this, I sent it to Aodhan on SketchFab and got really helpful feedback as well as a video to watch to try help me understand how the hair would move as I was struggling a bit. I decided to look into more videos to explain it.
Aodhan had gave me feedback to add a little bit of movement to the bag to make it look like it swayed side to side slightly. I first started off making the bag big when it was closer to the camera and small when it was away and kept gradually changing it to make it look a little bit more realistic. I was happy with how it was looking so I decided to clean up the animation and finish it!
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Final Personality Walk (GIF)
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Run Cycle (3D)
I decided to do the rest of my cycles in 3D. For the run cycle, I watched videos from Rachel to block out the key poses in Blender. I also used references which Aodhan gave us for 2D and the quick 2D run cycle I done in class which definitely needs slowed down a bit but I got the main key poses.
I feel like I didn’t struggle as much with this one as I watched Rachel’s videos and they really helped and made me become more confident! After looking over it, I tweaked the legs slightly to make it lower as the knee seemed to be coming up too high and looked unnatural. After feedback in class, Rachel had suggested a few tweaks for the hair moving which I did seem to struggle with in almost everything :,D and also changing the arms a little bit; one arm didn’t go back as further as the other and I also changed the hands a little bit to make it look more fluid. One tip I got from the videos Aodhan sent me and also from Rachel during the feedback session, was to think of hair as a sort of wave to help me animate it better so I kept this in mind for my run and jump cycle!
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Final Run Cycle
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Run and Jump Cycle (3D)
For the run and jump cycle, I had to play about with it just to get it to look right. We first started by doing a jump cycle in blender to get us used to the movement and then moved on. After blocking out the main poses, I noticed that it was looking too fast when my character ran.
I re-watched Rachel’s videos and I realised, I moved her way too much back for her run which made her look like she was sprinting. To fix this, I realised the difference between the poses was 100cm after 4 frames so from the last pose before she jumped (frame 30), I took away 100 every 5 poses to keep it even and it started looking way better! In class when I had started, I focused on a reference video on YouTube to get the rig to jump over a ball but I didn’t really like how it was looking, so I decided to make it so that my character would jump over a box instead, and I found a new reference video.
(First Reference Video)
(Extra Reference Video)
(Final Reference Video)
During the feedback session, Rachel noticed that my run seemed to be timed a little weird; when she was running, it wasn’t really matching when her feet would touch the ground so I ended up calculating it wrong. Other than that, I had the main jump blocked out and I changed the run a little to get the timing right, then I copied over the keyframes for the run and continued to edit the jump to try make it look fluid. I ws also trying to make the keyframes more even so I ended up taking most of the blocking out and re-doing it while looking at my reference video; I also realised that I had moved my character using her legs instead of the root of her rig so I had to redo all the locations for her for the root to follow her! I ended up having issues with the arms so I tried my best to work with them. I also noticed that the hands were looking a bit strange.
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Final Run and Jump Cycle
(Moving Camera)
(Still Camera)
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In conclusion, I’m honestly really happy with how far I’ve came. I always had issues comparing my work to others but looking back and comparing it to myself since the start of the year, I can see such a big difference in the way that I’m able to use software’s like ToonBoom and Blender, and how far I’ve came since first year worrying about a walk cycle so I’m very proud!