Monday, September 16, 2019

Animated Walk Cycle

The walk cycle is one of the most important learning concepts in animation--and also one of the most technically difficult, because it requires so much attention to the movement of opposing limbs.

However difficult, though, if you can learn to master a walk cycle then you can animate just about anything. There are many types of walk cycles, and you can vary the motion to match your character or his/her mood; you can do bouncy walks, shuffling walks, casual slouches. But the first and simplest is the standard upright walk, viewed from the side--and that's what we're going to attack in simplified form today.

You can cover the cycle of a full stride in 8 frames.

Here is a walking cycle Flash Tutorial.
Walking Cycle Tutorial
100 days of walk cycles
Here is a tutorial that criticizes the "Walking Cycle":
April Peter, Animator 
She has a good argument why the walking cycle is not the best way to learn.




  • Never stop thinking about who your character is.
  •  Each walk should be different to suite the weight, gait, strength, body type and attitude of the character. 
  • After you've finished the basic structure, you don't have to keep the keys of all the transformations on the same frames. Each separate rotation or translation can have a different timing.
  • Don't obsess about ending up with identical graphs for each step. Achieving perfect mathematics and achieving a good animation usually aren't the same thing.
  • In fact, try to dirty the walk up. For example, place the feet in a slightly different place every time. Play with the rotations of the torso, head or arms.
  • Sunday, September 15, 2019

    Teach us Something

    Explore a topic through animation. It could be a subject in school; something you have learned in class, or anything that you want to share or clarify to others.
    Communicate visually, 3 to 5 points about your topic.
    Have a main character, draw or import to the library
    Background/setting.
    Visual Story telling, but you can clarify with text.

    For your animation, consider the following Flash Techniques-

    1. Motion tween, shape tween, frame by frame, scale, colour tweens. etc..
    2. Different scenes
    3. Motion guide, and masking
    4. Importing an image & manipulating the image. 
    5. Consider pacing, dynamics, variety of frame, 
    6. Also consider visual compositional techniques: Rule of 3rds, Contrast, Repetition, Framing, Leading Lines.
    7. Sound.
    8. Credits- to create opening and closing credits to suite animation.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTb4wUZhBRA

    Minimum 15 seconds.