Run Cycle

Planning, Brainstorming and Shooting Reference

For the Character Animation for Film and Games module, we were given the task to create three Animation projects - a walk or run cycle that expresses an emotion, a facial performance/action combo or a game play pack/ narrative. I chose to do a run cycle, a facial performance and a narrative sequence.

As instructed during our classes, I followed the production pipeline for animating a sequence, starting out with brainstorming ideas for my walk or run cycle. I looked up numerous stylized walk and run cycles on platforms such as Youtube, Artstation, Instagram and Pinterest to collect inspiration before I started working on shooting my reference. There were plenty of different stylized cycles that expressed certain emotions and initially I decided to work with a being chased run cycle. I found Kevin Parry's Youtube channel which is very popular among animators and saw the 100 Different Types of Walks video https://youtu.be/cVjIqr8CTtQ and used the being chased walk as the reference to start working on my Animation. After I started blocking out the key poses I took Kshitij's feedback who was assisting our professor and he suggested that I start out with a simpler stylized walk and perfect it rather than working on something as complex as my reference initially. I took his advice and started working on another walk. I decided to work on a happy run cycle and decided to shoot my reference for it. I shot a reference that is more of a happy run/skip cycle and after the twentieth take, I was finally happy with how it looked. I shot my reference from the side and the front view and uploaded it up onto SyncSketch to start working on the Reference Analysis.?

Reference Analysis and Setting Up in Maya

After I uploaded my reference on Syncsketch, I started analyzing it using drawovers with the Syncsketch tools (it has been one of the greatest things I've learnt during the span of my course). For any given walk or run cycle there are 4 main key poses - the Contact, Down, Passing and Up. The rest are in betweens that are added to create Overlapping Action and Follow Through.?

You can view the Syncsketch file here ?https://syncsketch.com/sketch/MmZhNWNiNWUx/

I chose to work with the Jackie rig which was provided to students via Canvas by Professor Richard Cunningham and first checked the controllers on my rig and set my arms and legs in IK so that I could control the joints that are moving in relation with one another. IK stands for Inverse Kinematics and it helps ease the animation for arms, legs since they can bend. After checking the controllers on my rig, I set up my image plane that I wrote out via Nuke and set up an image sequence.

Blocking in Stepped Mode

Since I had already marked the key poses on my reference, I started blocking out the Contact, Down, Passing and Up poses on my character's legs. There are multiple methods of blocking out on a character - it was suggested by Constantinos who had conducted several support sessions for us on a weekly basis to start blocking out only on the legs and then work your way up. Hence, that's the method I followed. I took feedback from Richard, Kshitij and Constantinos after my blocking stage was complete and took notes for what needed to be corrected. While I was working in stepped mode, I was unable to turn the Enable Stepped Preview on because it was causing a break in my rig. Hence, I continued working in stepped mode to ensure that all my poses were created properly and the timing was established without turning the preview on and after blocking, I turned on Spline to check if the Animation was smooth. There were a couple of small changes that I made whilst checking the graph editor and smoothing out the curves and moving onto working on blocking the upper body. I created the overlapping action using the chest, waist and hip controllers for my character and then worked my way into animating the arms. I made sure that the movement of the arms was asymmetric to create a more natural dynamic movement. However, I noticed multiple jitters on certain keyframes while animating the arms that I fixed using motion trails and constant feedback on syncsketch and teams by Richard, Kshitij and Constantinos.?

I also wanted to add more exaggeration in the animation so I added over extension in the legs on the Up Key Pose and experimented with the timing and spacing of the character when she lands into the contact pose again to create more of a free willy look and feel of the character. I also animated her head like it's being led by the hips - the power centre for the character.

The most challenging part for me personally during this project were animating the arms because I would end up rotating the elbows in direction that looked quite painful for my character; to fix this, I started using my own arms and hands to understand the rotations and translations to avoid errors and also locked my translations and rotations in the channel box for my controllers where they weren't needed. This helped me clear my concepts and avoid repeating the same errors during my other projects.?

For the face and the hair, I animated Jackie's face with her eyes closed and an opening and closing smiling mouth as she looks happy inside her own little world. However, I received feedback from Will Cook - the Head of Animation at Blue Zoo Animation Studios - at the Bring Your Own Animation event for the hair to make them look more flowy and add more of an overlapping action and follow through based on the look and feel of my animation. Hence, I worked on the hair and made sure that they were more flowy and were more suited to the character.

After all of the inbetweens were added, I went into my graph editor and started cleaning up my animation and set the graphs to pre and post infinity cycles. I used Auto Tangent and Auto Ease in certain places in the graph editor when I was viewing my animation in Spline.?

Support Sessions

The weekly sessions conducted by Constantinos and Richard were a huge help for me in working on improving my animation. I remember the first walk I created when the second semester started and the feet were sliding, the arms were not smooth and I knew it was a long way to go. I personally think having Richard as our professor was one of the greatest things Kingston had to offer because of how brilliantly he managed his time to answer questions and queries. I am super grateful for the efforts put in by Richard in order to help us develop our skill sets to an industry standard and organize support sessions that really really benefited me in improving my skill sets.?

I personally think that the face and the torso could be better for my run cycle where I could create a better facial expression for my character and the torso could look more at ease and not a bit stiff -like it does right now. I will definitely be polishing my animation more because this process is never ending and there is always room for improvement. Hence, I will continue to work on my projects until they're perfect.?