The Run cycle

In my previous post I stated that I would begin working on the walk cycle. At this time I wasn’t sure if we was going to have a walk cycle, run cycle or even both. So I started working on a walk cycle since I thought in the end this would be something that I would have to learn. I had to do a lot of research from watching videos and looking at animations. I would often catch myself looking at other people as they would walk so I could better understand the process. 

In the first two weeks I was pretty much studying the process of the walk and how as we walk our bodies change formats. Going from low to a high, how our arms swing in the process and even how our clothes move with us. I had to keep this in mind when creating my character since I wasn’t really sure on how I would go about with the whole design process. 

Since I couldn’t get it down I grabbed reference and began to draw the character in Photoshop. Importing the reference in and changing the opacity down, this made it a lot easier when trying to compare my design with the process of the walk cycle. I had drawn the design on a separate layer since I tried to make the walking not similar to my reference, giving him his own style. 

As you can see above I had begun with the first step. This was somewhat frustrating with me because I realised after how many drawings I would have to do that it would be time consuming. I had to take a lot into consideration early on since I didn’t really want much to change from one frame to the next. 

Before I could continue on anymore I realised that in the game a walk cycle would be pointless and decided, after consulting with the designer that it would be more likely that he would be running. Again I had to do a quick research on a running cycle since I knew this would be a lot different than a simple walk cycle. For example the strides become a lot wider and the swing of the arms become faster and aggressive. Upon finding reference for the running cycle I repeated my process for the walk cycle and imported the image into Photoshop.

The procedure I took with the running cycle took a lot of time and became very frustrating in the end. The first step was just creating the first part of the run cycle. For this whole process I only used the hard edge brush tool and the erase tool. Since I was only sketching the design it would be only rough. 

At the start I wasn’t actually sure if my character would have his arms showing since he had a cloak that covered the top half of his body, so first I decided to focus on just the legs. Once I had the first one down I only had to simply duplicate the layer and used the layer I did before to save time. I would use the erase tool and erase the legs then draw them on as the next step. Around half way I realised that the legs would be the same as the last 6 drawings but the leg would swap. This again was easier since I would duplicate the layer and just switch what leg would be showing at the time.

Once I had them all down I decided to make the GIF quickly to see how it would look. Below is the quickly put together GIF and as you can tell this was still early stages. 

Once I had created this I could see a lot of problems with it and I knew I would have to re think my plan since I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the arms.