Walk cycles, woo!

Wow, walk cycles are pretty hard to do... You'll get the legs walking right then realise the arms are moving wrong, or the body's not doing much so the character's walking all boring. MAN.

But anyway, I got a couple done that I'm pleased with, one's a cartoon style (like disney style characters) which obviously, I'm not going to use, but it's good research, and the second one is a simple gentle walking loop, which I plan on using for my final piece.

Walk Cycle - Cartoon

Walk Cycle - Normal

I got a little creative with the second one and decided to add in an animated background, to make it look a bit more effective. Which I think it does ;)

I've just started on drawing the characters I'm thinking about using, I'll have the sheet on here soon enough, but it's taking a while, haha.

Quick post.

Just a quickie, I haven't had chance to do much at the moment, but I wanted to keep myself in the swing of things so I had a go at doing a little stick man action thing, it's not much, but it's something, right?

Stick Man Animation

Yep, More Turning Heads.

I went ahead and animated a couple more tests to do with turning heads and stuff, although when it comes to making the final thing, I don't really think I like this method... It's quite effective, but I just can't seem to animate it very, or at least it takes me WAY to long to do so.

This first one I'm quite proud of, as it took quite a bit of effort to get the proper outcome on the face itself. The face actually contains about 12 different assets/layers for the animation of it, as I wanted for him to have his eyebrows/eyelids move around as he looks around, etc. You can see in this screenshot:

Everything turned out pretty well though, although the mouth and nose don't seem to right when he turns round to face the camera, but other than that I like it...

Turning Head 2

The second test I did is a little surreal, but I used a few techniques I haven't yet, so alls well...

Onion Turning

...I successfully worked out how I can use masks to create the illusion that a part of the body has gone to the back and to the front again, I simply just added in a mask whenever I wanted some to be hidden and animated it accordingly. I think it turned out pretty well, even if it isn't the sort of thing I'll be animating for the project.

Simple tests

I've been trying to do some simple tests of animation to get myself warmed up with using Flash, the first I was trying to recreate a physics basis to the animation...

Physics Test

...with the ball bouncing and the machine picking it up. I added in a blue to the ball as it was falling to create more of a focus on how the ball is speeding up when it's dropped. The shadow in the background was simple made by taking the MovieClip of the main animation and duplicating it so it's just a solid colour with a blur. This test what all made frame-by-frame as I felt I could produce a better result doing it by hand. Got it all running at 20 FPS(Frame per second) so it's really quite smooth.

The second test was something I took from one of the tutorials that we were given as help for the project. This is probably the first of a few test that I might do, it involves me trying to animate someone turning their head/body with the tweening options, hopefully I can pull it off well...

Turning Head

...I think I did alright with this one, but obviously it's not the sort of character I want to be animating for my final thing. Also I'm not sure how I'd have the arm at the back go infront of his body when he turns round, I'll have to read up on that... This ones only running at about 16 FPS, but it's seems really smooth to me and saves on trying to animate intricate detail as with 20 FPS.

Next post will most likely contain a few more turning head animations, as I've just started another!

Character Sketches

Just been getting some ideas down for this project really, got a couple of character design ideas, but I don't want to start animating them yet until I have some tests done.

The character on the left I thought could be a sort of character that's not quite on the smart side and kind of moody. The character on the right seems pretty much the opposite, looking quite smart and intelligent, although maybe not as funny?

That's all I have for now, but I'll post some animation tests I've been doing soon. 

Next Project Time.

For our next assignment we've been asked to produce an interactive character model sheet using Adobe Flash.

We've had this described to us as "effectively a blueprint of a character from different angles that depicts a character’s key appearance, traits, attitudes and movement. The overall aim of a character model sheet is to familiarise the animator and others with the character."

I've been doing some sketches and stuff for some character designs which I'll upload later on.

As for that, I'll be going through some flash animating tutorials and produce some tests from them.