Becoming enamoured over someone else's work to the point that I have to top them has been the key to me being multitalented as well as my downfall, naturally. This time it just a walk cycle exercise; the teacher already gave us a template he made to follow from*; but I decided I was going to do one in perspective, and not only that, I've been dying to animated these characters for months now! HaHa. Well it started out ok, I even pushed it up to ones which is on this attachement here: (32MB) MillieWalkOn1s.mov However it's too happy. I wanted a walk more like this one, except the arms had to be moving as part of the requirement. It was ok I thought, I just had the head bob slightly from side to side and that would sell. Then I made a BIG mistake. I didn't redo the walkcycle, I just rendered Millie onto the happy walkcycle and adjusted the spacing and the poisitioning of the head. Now was when I found out Millie is exceptionally hard to keep on model. In fact I got into so much trouble in trying to get just the facial features correct, It almost got be back taking my wellbutrin again! I think I wasted over 200 sheets of animation paper over a 16 drawing walk cycle! On top of that, everyone I showed it to, teachers and students, kept calling her a boy! I know admit, the origionall creator of Millie is at fault for not adding any visual cues to let those who don't read webcomics (or at least all anthro ones) to Millies geneder. From waht RHJr has rumoured it could be because he's against the notion of "gender," and the reason why I suffered so terribly through this project is because God want's me to stay away from him and not attept to get this to replace "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy." Anyway this is the SECOND to last assignment I turned in before giving up(618KP Loops Hopefully): MillieWalkPersp.mov Well guess what? The head was still going too fast and too far! The technicall probelem I think; this being a 32 frame walk cycle on 2's; was that her head reached it's farthest right extreme exactly when her right foot reached it's farthest extreme. That drawing being key 17, it meant that for a notmal walk, the head oscilation compleates once per step, but I had taken 1/4 of that oscilation and stretched it out to the full walk cycle. Well I was too pooped to redo the whole thing, so waht my teacher said do was, just as a test, stretch the cycle to two steps, and have that 1/4 cycle streched so that it was finished on a 63 frame walk cycle, on twos. In other words have the body on twos but the head on fours. So I just split the layers in Photoshop and stretched the keyframes in AfterEffects and this is the best I could come up with (18 MB): MillieWalkHeadSlow_Comp 3.mov Yeah It looks choppy, because It needs inbetweening, but I've had it. I may never do another scrap of fanart again... * (btw, be careful of copying walk cycles directly from a book, ESPECIALLY if it's the Richard William's one. He's constantly showing us how to do things the wrong way or it tends to be extremely eccentric and isolated as a style. Just take those examples with a grain of salt. If you actually tried the walks on there that are physically possible, they are still redicuously beyond exxageration)!
That's cool, man. I didn't mean to have you re-do this one, just to offer the comments so you can apply them to your next piece. I'm feeling your pain right now at work, I'm actually trying to get a couple of characters walking together...and talking...and avoiding the other five characters in the scene... :) Fun times! :)
Good luck with your final. Just don't over-extend yourself. It's better to have 5 seconds of good animation than 60 seconds of decent animation. If your reel isn't really good in the first 10 seconds, just about every studio reviewer will eject it. So never put your best shot last, and if 10 seconds is all you have that's good, it's enough. Don't pad it out with something lousy.
That last bit was free, just me rambling for your eventual benefit down the road. :)
Thanks for the tips Gloria and Randy, but like I said I want to move on, I have a month to produce a (at the moment) one minute final for the class with 61 words of dialouge (oh, so it may be longer than a minute...my teacher's gonna kill me, it's only supposed to be 20 seconds)! If I ever work on this again it will be within a production crew for a TV short...not just expirimentation!
Also, the point of the Richard Williams cycles is not that you copy them. It's to open up your brain to the sorts of crazy things you can try in animation. Not all those things will fit the style of a given show, but what he's trying to do, by showing you so many crazy walk cycles, is to get you to stop thinking strictly about how things move in the real world and more about "what can I get away with." Of course, that crazy stuff only works if you get the mechanics right on everything else. So as far as school assignments go, you probably are better off studying the fundamentals of movement first, then applying a little dab of crazy. :)
Another thing that woul help your walk cycle is to squash and stretch the body a bit. It feels like most of the movement s just sliding the body shape from side to side. It should have some overlap (the top lagging behind the bottom or vice versa), and some ups and downs.
Dude, walks in 3/4 perspective are really hard, for any character. Don't be discouraged.
The main reason this doesn't feel sad is because you left in the sort of generic template body, and kept the same pose. See how her back is arched in this parentheses shape ) ? It should be arched the other way, like a C shape. Or really like the top half of an open parentheses shape ( . Right now her face is saying she's sad, but her body is saying she's proud, which is confusing to the viewer.
Comments
Good luck with your final. Just don't over-extend yourself. It's better to have 5 seconds of good animation than 60 seconds of decent animation. If your reel isn't really good in the first 10 seconds, just about every studio reviewer will eject it. So never put your best shot last, and if 10 seconds is all you have that's good, it's enough. Don't pad it out with something lousy.
That last bit was free, just me rambling for your eventual benefit down the road. :)
~R
Another thing that woul help your walk cycle is to squash and stretch the body a bit. It feels like most of the movement s just sliding the body shape from side to side. It should have some overlap (the top lagging behind the bottom or vice versa), and some ups and downs.
~R
The main reason this doesn't feel sad is because you left in the sort of generic template body, and kept the same pose. See how her back is arched in this parentheses shape ) ? It should be arched the other way, like a C shape. Or really like the top half of an open parentheses shape ( . Right now her face is saying she's sad, but her body is saying she's proud, which is confusing to the viewer.
Just my two cents.
~R