Week 3: Walk Cycle

For week 3 we were tasked with creating a basic walk cycle. The Walk cycle is a notoriously difficult to animate but is one of the main processes one must learn when starting out in animation. Walk cycles allow us to include personality, weight and mood into our characters while also exploring the natural arcs of the body.  
I started off by looking through the lecture slides. There was lots of different examples which showed the walk cycle in different body shapes. The picture on the right was the body shape which best resonated with me and therefore it was the one I choose to use moving forward. I felt that it used quite big limbs and that this would make it easier to follow when trying to create my own walk cycle. It also shows the different points of the walk cycle with the wording at the top which was really useful for my own animation as it gave me something to identify each frame as.
Later in the lecture I discovered this picture here which essentially shows the whole walk cycle and where to put the head for the in between frames. This was really useful as I was finding it quite difficult to move from one leg to the next for the second phase of the cycle, as the first example I was using only showed half of it. This example to the left definitely helped me out a lot more and allowed me to get a very clear understanding of height and shape for the body.

Attempt 1
For my first attempt I got half way through the walk cycle. I thought it was going quite well and I was just keeping it rough and as free hand as possible. However the further I got in the more difficult it became and then I realised that I was doing each of the different body parts all on the same layer. This made things quite confusing as it meant that I was drawing on top of other body parts when they were overlapping. Therefore I decided to stop this attempt and give it another go with each body part on a layer of its own.

Attempt 2
So for attempt 2 I set out with a separate layer for each part of the body. I also decided that doing each part of the body in a different colour was a good idea as it would again help me to differentiate between them. 
I feel that this attempt went quite well overall, I still kept it quite rough throughout as I knew I could come back and clean it up again later. 
When completing my second attempt at the walk cycle I noticed that the example I was following was from the animators survival kit. So I went and had a read of the recommend section and came across this interesting section for the same example which talks about creating a beat while your character walks. IT says that most people walk in a marching beat, or in 12s, but that most animators usually draw a walk cycle in 16s or 8s as this is easier to divide up. Because I was already following this example before I came across this I was already creating my walk cycle in 8s without knowing I was doing it for that purpose. Now that I know, its definitely something I can look to experiment with in the future.

After I finished my second attempt I decided that I was quite pleased with how it turned out and that I would go back and do a cleaned up version of it. For this I just did one layer in black and traced a clean line art version of each frame and then paint bucketed in it so that it was all in black. 
Overall I think that my walk cycle is okay and gets the job done, however I feel that there is some points where it is a bit janky. For example where it begins to loop again I don't feel that the last and first frame line up that well, however after trying to fix this multiple times I think I have got it to the best I can, without just remaking the whole animation. The walk cycle as a whole gives me the impression that my persons arms want to go wherever he is walking but his legs do not, if that makes sense to anybody. 
I definitely plan on revisiting the walk cycle very soon and after this task I now know some very valuable techniques which can be used to make it that bit easier. I would definitely stick to different layers for the rough sketches, it just makes everything a lot clearer and simpler overall. I would also make sure that my last frame and first frame line up correctly from the beginning, as going back and trying to correct that was a massive pain and something which I just couldn't get right. 
I'm very interested in trying the walk cycle with different character shapes and weight values. I know that as animators we over exaggerate the weight of the legs to make the cycle look real. This is something I would be very interested in experimenting with and seeing how far I can push this exaggeration. 
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