Walk Cycle

 

Transitioning into the walk cycle project, I was curious how smoothly it was going to proceed. I had previously had experience creating walk cycles in 3-D thanks to my 3D Animation 1 class, and it was my assumption at the time that a lot of the knowledge in creating one there would transfer over to 2D animation. For what it's worth, I'd say I was half-right! The project began with me knowing how to divide up a 24-frame walk into 8 keyframes, and I quickly put together something that I was happy with.

The challenges for this project that were unique to 2D animation rose up later. The first hurdle was deciding how to divide my 8 keyframes into 12, as the assignment was meant to be animated on 2s. I ultimately decided to split up the remaining 4 keyframes in a pattern to keep the balance and stability of the animation. From there, I had to do tweaking of the blocked-out shapes such as the arms and legs to accomodate sleeves and details, which wasn't too difficult. The final tweak I made to my character was their hair; it had come out stiff compared to the way everything else moves, and I had to do a bit of redrawing to get it to look more natural. Compared to 3D Animation, where we didn't have to rig any part of the hair at all for assignments, this was something I had to pay a lot more attention to.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the project was setting up the peg and the ensuing problems it caused. I had known for a while that I wanted the background to scroll during the walk cycle, so I drew a very long background early into the project with the intention of making it scroll later on. Unfortunately, it took me longer than I would have liked to get the peg to work properly, and I found it rather unintuitive to set up. 

The other problem with the moving background was that I didn't want part of it to show through the character via overlap. I figured the easier option was to simply color in the character through a new layer, rather than erasing from each frame of the background's movement. However, I had trouble getting the fill / paint tool to work with me, so I had to instead box out every single frame with color and then erase around the outlines of my character. If the paint tool had been more co-operative, it would have been nice to give proper colors to my character, as I haven't done that with any of my projects before.