Walking/running cycle - 2D animation
School Project
Goal: Make a looping walking animation. 500x500px gif-format.
My very first walking cycle!! Would you look at that?!
But why not up the game and make a walk/run animation as your very first character walking cycle? What could possibly go wrong, right?!
I ended up having a ton of fun with this project and learn so so much! Not only about animation but also After Effects - I program I have been apprehensive of using in the past.
Made with Photoshop & After effect
My first step was to get a better understanding of parenting and placement of the origin points. I made myself a small drawing of a half of a human to get a better overview. As I already knew I wanted to animate a woman the "mother" of my parenting was the hips and not the chest. I read in an article that men and women has different center of balance so I took that in as inspiration. (I didn't fact check this tho. I will do next time).
I divided all parts into a color to make the progress easier for me. I made guide lines to make sure her feet stayed on the ground and have a better feeling of the placement of her hips. Her animations is made with keyframes. I started making the keyframes back to back, to make sure that the animation would look good step by step. Then After Effects could make it more fluently once the timing was set. I animated in 2's.
First walking cycle everh <3
I wanted to test the walking cycle before adding too much visuals to the model to get the feel of the movement.
Like every else, this was achieved my playing around with keyframes until it look somewhat a walking cycle.
I ended up not being happy with the result at all and started over.
At this point I realized that walking cycles are HARD!
(and also that I like a good challenge)
I created this sunrice-scene with just squares and caffeein to keep my company. Every water layer was exported seperatly in order to animate the water flow
Time for colors!!
I always struggle finding the right colors for my work, so as always I found a color generator that could help me find the right mood and vibe I was looking for.
I went for warm colors but the focus was mainly to match her skin tone, that I had already visioned before getting started.
To get some motivation and confidence after my first walking cycle, I decided to make the visuals of the character.
The character (I named her Summer) was made in photoshop.
I used a juggidy textured brush to make the edges a bit uneaven. This was mostly just a trial because I like that style but have never tried it myself before.
All part of her was made with different layers.
Once I was done creating my character. I could get started on the walking animation.
I animated in total of 8 different cycles, 2 of them I scrapped and started over as they did not work at all for my vision.
I learned that I work super well with dividing all the different animations into different compositions and collect it once they are done. It gives me a much better overview as I get overwhelmed easy by too many layers while I'm learning new programs.
All the animations are made by duplicating the walking animation and tweaking here and there for the desired look.
I learned now that it's better just to start over when going from walking to running. The process was somehow more tedious and the result not too good either, so I would do that differently next time.
Here you can see all the chosen animations that I collected in the end for the final animation
Once all animations had been collected, I did small tweaking as a very subtle squeeze/stretch as she starts running and making her body jump a little more during the running animation.
This was a very fun project and I learned so much from it! I normally don’t do much with characters - let along animations.
However when I made this project I was not aware how I would use what I have learned in future animations, where I have been animating 3D characters from scract or scrap different 2D character animations togeather, made by someone else, in order to make a running, jumping and running cycle.
I want to give a huge shout out to our amazing, talented and wonderful industry leader Bee Grandinetti whom I learned a lot from!