Walk that Walk

Day 3 and 4

The exercise this time around is a walking animation and looks like it will take several classes to complete. The requirements are to animate a simple figure walking across the screen. We are doing this on 8's, which means the figure must complete a step in 8 frames. And to walk across the screen, he must do a minimum of 5 steps.

Here are some early tests:

walk_test.mov
walk_test_on_4.mov

The way I did this was on one sheet of paper I planned out the walk.



Starting out with a series of 5 contact positions (where the forward foot is contacting the ground). The feet for two contact positions should overlap. with that done, I then focused on all the intermediate head positions. When walking the head moves in a wave shape with the head moving up and down between the high and low points. I then figure out the 8 body positions to go along with those 8 frames, along with the feet and arms. The arm positions are opposite of the foot positions (right foot fwd, left arm fwd, etc). I got a little crowded with the positions, so I moved to working each of the 8 positions on each sheet. These made up the first 8 frames. Using the plan sheet I continued with the 9th frame marking where the head should be, then using the first frame as a guide to trace off the rest of the body. I continued this for all of the rest of the frames. I did have to remember to slightly modify for the alternating arm/leg positions between each step to match which leg was the forward step.

In my final animation, it actually crosses the screen in 3 steps, but it seems to be enough to see the walk. He has a bit of the stretchy leg thing going on though...

Here's the "finished" product:

wesley_walkfinal2.mov