Animation Production

Harmony Walk Cycle

This project consisted of creating a 2D walking cycle on the spot with a character that has two arms, legs, a torso, and a head. The character had to hit the ground on time when the foot was going to make contact. 

I started off with creating a simple blocked character in my sketch book to try and get an understanding of what I wanted to animate. I then opened up Harmony and began to draw my character. This had some difficulties though, as I needed to have my character in a mid walking pose so I had to play around with the design a little.

Some problems I came across were that I wasn't proportioning the body correctly and that one leg was longer than the other. Other problems were, that the steps that the character took weren't in sync with the original steps and made the animation very jumpy.

I decided to try and create a stick man walking cycle first, so that I could get the hang of the static walk cycle. Once this was accomplished, I created it so that the left side of the body was coloured in red and the right side was in black, just to help me out to know which leg was which when animating. During animating this, I also created a flat ground just so I am able to figure out where my characters feet are suppose to land on the floor. 

Once I finished the stick man version of the walk cycle, I added body parts in the correct places so that I could have a complete character, rather than a stick figure. 

My stick man walks as if he is in a rush. This could either be because having 24 frames is too quick, or I have animated him in such a way that he just walks very sternly. Because of this, his head is quite still but it does bob up and down. However, I feel like this works really well because he looks like he is focused and that he is a man on a mission. I have tried to animate with 18 frames instead of 24 and this works very well, however it doesn't seem like a more rushed walk like it should be.

I am very proud of this animation as it is my first 2D walk cycle. I believe I created a good rushing walk cycle as the character looks like he's not stopping for anyone. One thing I would change about this animation would be to improve on the head bobbing, and perhaps the bounce of the body needs to be more soft rather than stern.

Maya Walk Cycle

For this project, I had been assigned with creating a walk cycle with an already existing rig on a character in Maya. 

At the start of this project, I ran into a lot of problems with my rig. Whenever I wanted my rig to walk, the legs would slide across the floor rather than actually lifting and stepping down. To control this, I had to time the right key frame so that the foot/ feet will be planted and stay in place until it is lifted. 

Other than a walk, I challenged myself to create a running cycle. I find that animating the rig running is much easier than walking. 

I originally started the animation in a static position running, I had to quickly change this and actually make the rig run off screen/ camera to follow the criteria. The hard part of doing this, was the lift in the body movement and pushing the body forward at the same time. 

I had to change the movement of the feet when they are lifted up because they always stayed flat when lifting up. To change this, I had to increase the foot roll so that it would be at an angle as if it was a real foot. In some frames, my character looked like as if it was jumping up rather than lunging forward for the next step. I had improved the look of the feet lifting by increasing the foot roll in the layer editor when the character lifts the legs. I swayed the hips from left to right once a leg added more weight on than the other to make the running animation more realistic.

I have positioned my character rig in the correct spot to render. Other than using one angle to view the animation, I will add various camera angles in the scene as I have had previous experience using cameras in Maya. I will also add a few light sources in the scene so that my character is shown perfectly in the scene.

I ran into a major problem coming towards the end of the project. All this time I have been operating on the 2018 version of Maya. The program then decides to update to the 2019 version which made my animation run much more quicker than I would have wanted. And when I imported then images to Premier Pro, the footage was incredibly slow which was very strange. To overcome this, I rendered all of the camera angles on 20fps, sent them over to Premier Pro again but I increased the speed of the clip so that the animation would a little faster rather than at a snails pace. 

Here are some of the rendered images I took.

This was how the animation looked, it was a very painful process because of the amount of attempts I did trying out various techniques. However, I am glad I was able to gain this new experience with a pre-made rig, I believe making one from scratch would've taken months so I am happy that I only had to move it. Overall this was a great animation to create but I will try to make it easy on myself next time.

Stop Motion Cycle

In this project, I had to move a pre-made rig physically in the stop motion studio. I had to use Dragonframe to collect all my photos together after I was done taking pictures of the walk cycle. 

Although this was much quicker than the other two methods, it proved to be a little finicky at times. Sometimes I would feel that I was moving the rig too quickly and making the frames jump too much. Other times, I would misplace the rigs last position and it would often show the rig jumping back to a previous space. 

Me, Ethan, Will and Margot all played around with the rigs by creating a little fight scene. However, the camera lighting was very dim and the video wasn't bright enough. This was our first problem with the camera that we easily overcame by changing the light settings on it whilst also changing the brightness of the footage on Dragonframe. 

Whilst moving my rig forward, I also swayed the body and the hips from side to side to get that little sense of realism. I also swung the arms back and forth too. 

Overall this technique was very simple and easy to do, I would much more prefer to make another walk cycle with the stop motion technique rather than the Maya technique. Maybe next time to challenge myself I could make the rig run and jump, or I could even add a few effects to touch up on the final rendition of the animation.

Here is a link to all of the techniques in one video.

Overall, this was a fun experience in learning the different techniques of a walk cycle, and I would much rather prefer the physical stop motion animation, rather than the 3D Maya. I did enjoy creating my walk cycle on Harmony, however I would like to learn more skills to create much more smoother walk cycles in the future.