Walk Cycle

 16/02/24

The brief for this task was to create two animations: an on-the-spot walk cycle and an animation of a character walking through a space. To begin, I constructed a skeleton animation (consisting of the nine keyframes) to base my eventual final walk cycle on.

 

 

From here I developed the skeleton, adding 'meat' to the guidelines as well as arms. I also decided to block out obscured limbs with colour. This proved successful in creating a clear distinction - and so carried over to later developments.

 

 

From here I went to develop the 'character' digitally, landing on a basic form with a jacket (which I could colour to give a jittery, sketchy feel to the walk). I think this cycle showed a decent sense of movement, but the consistency of, say, the head left something to be desired. This (among other minor tweaks such as fat folds and overlaps) would be added when this character and cycle were repurposed for the second animation, in a space.

With some (minor) secondary animation on the cold beach backdrop, I feel like this animation has a better sense of solid drawing. Whilst the frames can still feel 'jittery', as mentioned that was partially intentional. I also produced a video version of the animation with some sound elements added for clarity. I think I could have maybe adapted the cycle better, with tweens and some frames that reacted to the environment (such as footfalls into the sand). But, overall, I'm happy enough with the output as it was cathartic to go through this sort of additive process.