Animating a figure from stationary to running

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

What are the factors that you are dissatisfied with in your animation?

Depending upon where you are with it and where you want to go, some of the following thoughts may be helpful or irrelevant.

I personally have some trouble with dealing with walk cycles. I have used programs like ToonBoom to learn hand drawn animation and I find that creating a realistic walking (or running) figure is quite difficult. Using reference works such as Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Human Figure in Motion” can be very helpful. You might not even have to buy a copy… the front cover shows seven frames of a man running that may be exactly the run cycle you need. You can probably find an image of the cover on Amazon.

A factor critical to getting the right “feel” for the movement is adjusting acceleration and deceleration of movement. The curve editor is ideal for dealing with these. As the figure begins to move, they should accelerate into the movement, then perhaps keep a rolling speed and then decelerate. The way the legs and arms move may involve careful tweaking of acceleration into and out of each swing. I find it very helpful to get up and walk to get a better “feel” for what the legs and arms actually do while walking or running.

Not having worked with the puppet tool much, I really don’t know what I am talking about, but my feeling is that the it will not be the way to animate this. If you are using an icon style figure made from geometric shapes, you may be better off making the body one layer, each leg and arm another layer and the head yet another layer. Placing the anchor points at the joints, you may need to animate it like a paper doll. The problem with the puppet tool is that it creates a bendable mesh that moves fluidly rather than in the hard, geometric style of an icon. I suppose you could use “hold interpolation” of your keyframes, but it depends upon the look you seek. Also you might be able to reduce the number of triangles the puppet tool uses and thus have more rigid control, but in the end, building the figure in layers might be better if that is the quality of movement you are looking for.

If you do build the figure in layers, it seems to me that the most efficient way would be to create a comp wherein you animate the figure going from a stand still to running in place. You might be able to loop the run cycle with loop expressions, but it might be easier to create a standing-still-to-running comp, a single-run-cycle comp, and a running-to-stopping comp of your figure. You can then drop these into a new comp wherein you create multiple instances of the single-run-cycle comp to have as many running steps as you need. At this point, the figure should be running in place, not across the screen.

Once you are happy with the run cycle, drop this into your final comp wherein you move the figure across the top line of text.

It sounds like you might have already tried some of these paths so forgive me if I’m stating the obvious. In any case, if you can further describe what you are trying the achieve, we might be better able to help.

Lars

[Mike Clasby]

I think a little TIme Remapping on a looping walk cycle will do what you want.

Have you seen Dan’s excellent tut “Animating a Walk-Cycle Using Loop Expressions”:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping.php

You can set up the layers that way, like Dan’s comp named “Model”, for a looping walking model.

Then to go from standing to walking, time remap the layer (Layer>Enable Time remapping). Say you want to go from standing to walking in a step and a half, go to that point where you want her to be up to full speed, then add a time remapping keyframe (that little check box by the Eyeball). So you’d now have three keyframes.

Now you can make that first time remapping kayframe an Ease Out, or twirl Time Remapping down and tweak the curves to your liking. You can slide that second keyframe left or right.

Look at a real person go from standing to walking, or a clip, to get the “launch” and acceleration timing right. If the actions for launch, getting going from a stop, are way different than the walk cycle, dup the comp, disable the loop expressions (U or ee reveals all, click the equal sign to disable) then change the keyframes of the rotations and position of the model to make the initial move right, but I think a quick remap of the looping comp will look fine.

Then when Vector Girl is up to speed add the comp with the loop expressions to keep her on the go.

It’s very doable, but as with anything, it takes time. Hope you have enough.

If you want to have Vector Girl, err Woman, do other things, like Dance a Jig, see Dan’s Tut “Inverse Kinematics Redux”, setup is a little work, but then she can do anything.

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html

This a marvel.

[Rebecca O’neill]

Thanks very much both of you!
playing around with the layers now, and using that Dan’s way of articulating it like a puppet is really helping, its only a prototype so she can be a little jerky, all i’m doing is just giving a rough idea as to whats supposed to happen.
Thanks again 🙂