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Walking,
running, shuffling, skipping, hopping, jumping, swimming and
other forms of human and animal locomotion are rhythmic cyclic
actions which can be described using a handful of drawings. Walking is a complex repeating
pattern of movements consisting of all sorts of interesting
counterplays. The up and down bobbing of the body, the
swinging pendulum motion of the arms, the rocking motion of
the pelvis, and the complex arcs described by the picking up
and putting down of the feet.
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Some
of the complex paths of motion found within a walk
cycle
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Walking or running is a continuous process of falling off
balance which is momentarily stopped by putting a foot out in
front to save you from falling flat on your face. The faster a
character moves, the further
the centre of gravity shifts outside the body until it leans
forwards in the direction the character is headed towards.
(see images below right)
Design
a character or lifeform in profile facing to the right and walk
it on the spot as though on the continuously moving belt of a
treadmill exercise machine. This means that the feet of your
character will slide smoothly underneath its body. Use pencil
and punched paper for this exercise.
Think about your character's personality and the way it is
feeling and see if you can capture this in your animation.
Characters with bright, happy dispositions are usually
light-footed and bouncy, spending more time up in the air than
down. Sad depressed characters will plod along with the weight
of the world upon their shoulders spending most of their time
close to the ground. They drag their feet, never lifting them
very high, in an effort to conserve energy. Animated characters
can walk about a third faster than real life humans and yet
still look quite normal so 8-16 drawings will be sufficient
unless your character is particularly lethargic.
Bringing something to 'life' by yourself is one of the biggest
creative thrills going. For the moment try to resist the
temptation of referring to the walk cycles illustrated in
various animation reference books. Your animation will be far
more interesting to look at without copying these formulaic and
well known walks.
So, get up off your chair and walk, run,
skip, or hop around the studio. Feel what your body is doing.
Where is the centre of balance? How does your weight transfer
from foot to foot? What happens to your arms. Grab some props if
you want to include them and observe what happens. Get a friend
to mimic the kind of walk you want (its less embarrassing) and
study the way they move.
Does your character have a limp? Is it walking the dog? It
doesn't have to be a two-legged character, of course. It could
even be half animal, half machine. Does it crawl, hop, skip,
deform and reform?
Think of props like umbrellas, hats and bags crutches, walking
sticks which might make your cycle richer and more interesting
to look at. What happens to the loose bits - clothing, trouser
legs, skirts, scarves, hair, fur, or even large ears and noses?
All objects have some kind of mass and therefore inertia. Loose,
floppy or springy appendages tend to lag behind the main action
once set in motion and then become a kind of delayed echo. You
will have to consider the 'follow thru' and 'overlapping action'
principles of animation to handle these elements of your design.
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How
to treat loose bits and appendages and even body fat.
These are often up 180 degrees out of phase with the
object they are attached to. A trouser leg (top) and
hair and a hat (bottom) from 'The Animator's Survival
Kit' by Richard Williams. The accompanying animation
shows how loose appendages might trail the major
initiating action.
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The
diagram below illustrates the 'wave' principle of
animation. The first two diagrams are half cycles of the
full action. The bouncing ball above with its tail is an
example of this. The other two show a floppy appendage
as though attached to the bottom, then hanging from the
top.
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Please
work rough while you are still developing your walk cycle. Use
this exercise to refine your cyclic motion by editing and
reworking drawings. Save all your earlier versions on our
pencil-tester so we can see the way your walk develops. You can
clean-up the drawings once you are happy with the final pencil
test. Later in the semester we will look at ways of scanning
your drawings into a computer for electronic ink and paint,
and/or to exhibit them on the front page of our web site.
It is
always easier to start a walk cycle with the 'stride' position
(the pose shown in the illustration of the rabbit above). This
pose determines how much ground the character will cover during
one step or one half of your final cycle.
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This diagram from 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by
Richard Williams, maps out what happens during a single
step. The first and last poses are the stride positions
for each leg. It also shows how the head might bob up
and down. As this figure is in profile, the silhouettes
of these poses are almost the same. This is how our
drawings would look if we were to animate a figure
across the page. However in this assignment, we will
walk your character on the spot.
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In
a walk cycle, the feet either slide back underneath the body if
the character is walking on the spot, in which case the
background is made to pan through frame as if the camera is
following the character, or the feet remain fixed against the
background as if the camera is stationary and the character
walks through frame. The advantage
of walking your character on the spot as though on a stationary
treadmill is that you minimise the amount of work to be done. If
we were to walk a character through frame without using
the advantages of a repeating cycle, we may have to create 75 or
90 drawings. In the old days, walking-on-the spot cycles were
traced off onto wide cells which could be panned through frame
at a rate which matched each foot position. Now we can get a
computer to either push our character across a background, or to
pull a background past our character.
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This is an example of a head-on walk to camera by Tony
White taken from his book ' Animation from Pencils to
Pixels: Classical Techniques for the Digital Animator.
This character is baring considerable weight. Note the
bow-legged stance of the legs (which makes for clear a
silhouette) and way the feet kick out as the body rocks
from side to side.
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When
creating a walk cycle for the first time, there is probably a
tendency to make your character cover too much ground in a
single step. You need to think very carefully about your
character, its temperament, any idiosyncrasies, and the
constraints of any physical impediments (a limp, carrying a
heavy object, pushing or dragging something) and of its working
design. Those things may determine the length of its stride. A
little old lady with a walking frame, for example, will only
shuffle along in tiny steps which might only be half the length
of her shoe, while a young fit sprinter, by comparison, could
cover lots of distance in a single leap.
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This
is a great character design but the figure's stride pose
(shown here) is excessively exaggerated. This walk is
arguably trying to cover too much distance in a single
step. This could be a visual gag in itself, of course,
as this chap looks pretty cool and aloof as he covers so
much territory. The legs work well but the body seems to
freeze every now and then. It is better to keep the body
constantly moving even though you may want its action to
be subtle. This 8 drawing walk cycle is only a half
cycle - the arms and legs swap sides at the end of each
repetition.
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The
distance between the heels of each foot when divided up by half
the number of drawings in the cycle can be used to set the
position for each foot in the cycle where it makes contact with
the ground. Work these divisions out on a piece of paper and
number them. If you keep this reference sheet on the pegs bars
at all times and turn on your back light, it will provide a
guide as to where to place the feet in each of your drawings.
The use of this guide helps avoid feet that unintentionally slip
against the background. Part of the illusion of creating a
believable world is that certain laws of nature still appear to
apply. To move about the world we have to push off something.
Our feet usually push against mother earth, or if we are
swimming, against the water. So remember that one foot usually
stays in firm contact with the ground so that it can propel the
mass of the body forward. Feet that slip all over the place
break that precious illusion. For this exercise, your character
is to walk on the spot, therefore its feet will slide underneath
the body according to the distance you've determined.
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| Typical
foot action from 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by
Richard Williams. |
Other
things to consider is whether your character might twist or roll
its torso, pelvis or shoulders, or rock from side to side as it
walks, or indeed lunge forward and back the way a bird's head
does as it stalks insects. You can
put quirky and rhythmic visual accents or beats into your cycle
by emphasising a particular
pose. To do this you either bunch your inbetweens around the
chosen pose to give that gesture more screen time, or you
deliberately give it a 'bump' by making a particular drawing
quite different from the previous ones. For example, if a
character is walking with a very determined angry stomp, you
will need to have a strong contrast in terms of distance between
the leading foot when
it is reaching out into the air before it
strikes the ground, and the point where it makes impact with the
ground.
Remember, part of the challenge of this exercise is to convey
something of your character's personality and current emotional
state both within its design and
the way its these qualities might be expressed through its
movement. You'll have to figure that out first before anything
else.
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Master
Melbourne character animator, Frank Hellard,
demonstrates the various poses within a walk cycle -
the stride, the crossover, the cushion, and the reach
or lift positions. Frank was lead animator for
Melbourne's first animated feature film,
Grendle, Grendle, Grendle written, directed and
produced by Alexander Stitt.
An historic moment - this sequence was shot in 1984 on
our brand new Lyon-Lamb VAS single frame Video
Animation System. It was the first one to arrive in
Melbourne and won an Academy Award for technical
innovation the year before. The arrival of this
marvelous device meant that our students could now get
immediate feedback on their animation tests without
having to wait for a roll of film to be developed.
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A
walk cycle pose at the 'stride' position. This should
be the starting point of any animated walk as it
determines the physical distance your character will
cover for each step. Divide the stride length, i.e.
the distance traveled in one step (above) by half the
number of drawings in your cycle. The red line
indicates the off-balance lean required of a typical
walk cycle.
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The
above example is from a running cycle. The red line
indicating how much the character needs to lean
forward off balance to move faster. The example below
is of a fast run. This character is way off balance
and the fully extended arms reinforce this state.
Let's hope it doesn't trip over otherwise a serious a
injury could occur.
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A
character walking into a strong wind. When pushing
against something, even if its wind, or when a
character has to pull something heavy, the feet must
have lots of contact with the ground. In this case,
when each foot swings forward to take a step, it does
so only momentarily so as to gain traction as quickly
as possible. Note the random cycle of shapes on the
coat tails. No need to think here, just some shapes to
indicate busy fluttering. This is a 24 drawing cycle,
hence it moves slowly.
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By
way of contrast to the above walk, a run cycle by
Michael Vandenhoven. Notice how the body leans forward
to attain a greater state of unbalance than for a normal
walk. The faster we run, the more we lean into the
direction of travel. The feet work really well and there
is a great sense of them just dabbing onto the ground
momentarily with each step but with sufficient power to
keep the character moving. Also note the way Michael has
treated the mouse's ears and extended hands which work
in counter balance to the body's up and down motion.
This 8 drawing cycle
is very competent indeed.
Look at the way the pelvis twists.
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A
lovely lilting limp by Sal Cooper. This was an accident.
The limp comes from the fact that the left and right
feet are slightly asymmetrical in their motion and
because the foremost foot lingers in the same spot for
two consecutive drawings as it touches the ground. This
produces a rhythmic 'bump' in the cycle. The rough
sketchy linework looks great and gives this animation
lots of vigour. This cycle was digitally colourised from
black and white pencil drawings using 16 shades.
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A
stomp by Sally Allard which illustrates a walk with a
strong visual beat. The 'bump' in the action results
from the fact that the leading leg is raised very high
before making contact with the ground providing a lot
of contrast between it and the preceding drawing. You
can almost hear the foot stomping on the ground.
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