Protagonist Walk, Run Cycles and Animation tests

Now that the character design was complete and was something that I was happy with, I decided that it was time to bring these characters to life, with walk cycles and test animations. I feel that these are not only important practice but also help to create a good feel for the personality of the character. 

Above is the front plan for my character, I will be using it as a reference when creating the animations, to help create an animation with consistency. 

To begin with, I wanted to create an animated walk cycle. While looking for some walk cycle references that I felt that fit the character, both in personality but also size and build, I couldn't find any reference involving heels, and couldn't create any of my own references at that point in time, I had to improvise and create the walk cycle without her shoes on.

Above is the key frames test for the walk cycle, this was 9 frames running a 24fps. I was pretty happy with how it was coming along at this time so decided to continue down this path. 

I went ahead and completed the animation at 24fps. It was only upon completion of the animation that I began to find problems with it, the two most glaring being the weird and static head, and the shoulder overextending. That being said I was happy with how the dress looked. 

When reviewing the animation, i decided to start again, using this initial animation as a base, cleaning up the lineart, as well as fixing the animation errors of the first gif. 

Another thing i decided to change was the frame rate from 24 to 12 in order to speed up my process, but also to make the walk cycle look slower and more natural.

I began by working on getting the shoulder movement fixed, and making sure the feet stay along the same plane for the entire gif. Happy with how the animation was progressing, I went back in and added the arms, and the head. 

in the previous animation I was particularly unhappy with how the head looked. In this attempt, I made a conscious attempt to make the head look like it was moving more in line with the rest of the body. Another thing i looked at was giving the hair bounce with her movements, adding to the believability of the piece. Happy with how it came out, i went back and added colour to the animation.

When the colour was added it was much easier to distinguish parts of the body and helped bring the whole animation together. it also helped minimise the jittering that the animation had when it was only line art. This was a significant improvement to the initial walk cycle. I am happy with how this came out, especially since it was my first walk cycle that i had animated this year in 2D.

Once this animation was completed, i decided i then wanted to create a run cycle, as the animation i will be creating will be using a lot of action and dynamic movements. I drew the keyframes as seem below.

The keyframes look very stiff and too fast, i thought that it would help when the line art and colour was added. Once thing i found hard while creating this was how the skirt would flow, but this is something i planned to learn and research throughout the development stage of this production.

When the line art was completed and the colour was added the animation looked a lot better, that being said, if the animation was stared at for too long it would begin to look weird, and and different computers and screens the character would run at different rates, much to my dismay. The animation was a 6 frame cycle at 12fps. I decided to extend the duration of each frame to 1/4 of a second, to give the animation time to breath and look more believable, compared to the Usain bolt speeds of the previous animation.

When the animation was slowed down it became a lot easier to digest and less slide showy, I was happy with how these animations came out, they taught me a lot about the character design, and also how a characters movement effects their personality. I plan on creating more animations, including a lip sync for this character, as well as walk cycles for other character designs i have created.

Overall I am very pleased with how these animation test turned out. They help give me an idea of how my character will move, and if there were any issues that were arising in the core design of the character, which I am happy to see there weren't. This is an important part of the industries pre-production process, so it was important to investigate, as I am employing proper industry practices in my own pre-production work, which will hopefully evelate my project to the next level.