Wednesday 27th November 2013

Walk Cycle

Today I began to work on my walk cycle for my cat. I decided that I should create the walk cycle first as I have never drawn a walk cycle for an animal and I need it to be able to create my animation. As it was my first time drawing a walk cycle for a cat I decided to use an already made animation as a reference.

Using this gif I began trying to make my cat animation. I have been finding it relatively difficult because I need to keep redrawing the legs and paws in the correct positions but the animation is coming together. I've been using the onion skin tool constantly as it allows me to know where the last frame was, this allows me to make sure that the legs and paws are moving. The only downside about my animation so far is that the animal resembles a dog more than a cat. I haven't added any features to the drawing yet so that may help but for now I'm going to get the walk cycle finished and worry about the details later.

This is how I have been drawing each frame of my animation. On the left is a still image of the already completed animation and on the right is my attempt. As you can see I have left out the facial features of my animation and this is because I felt that I should learn the walk cycle first. Once I have completed it I'll then edit it to fix any errors and also draw the features in correctly.

To get all the still images of the animation I just imported the gif file into the Flash library and it automatically cut the animation up into 13 images. I then set my FPS (Frames Per Second) to match the amount of images. The reason why I needed to have my animation at 13 FPS is because if it was at the standard 24/25 FPS the animation will need to play nearly twice per second and this will cause it to be faster than it should be. So leaving it at 13 FPS the animation will run once per second so it'll be at a normal pace.

This shows that the onion skin is being used as well as the FPS has been set at 13.