After the walkcycle with the prop we were asked to do a stylized walkcycle in which we had to find reference footage and do our animations based on that reference and make a storyboard with keyframes from that reference.
At first I was unsure which walkcycle to do, there are so many options to chose from, happy, sad, drink, zombie walk, sleep walk, agry, sneaky… At the end I wanted to make a zombie walk or a sneaky walk and I finally decided to do a sneaky walk. The movement is much different from what I’ve done before and the movement of the body is extreme – perfect for a stylized walk.
The animation principles used are:
- timing and motion
- antecipation
- stagging
- follow through and overlaping action
- straight ahead and pose to pose action
- slow in and slow out
- arcs
- exaggeration
Reference
Then I took screenshots of the main poses from my reference:
With this I realized that then there is a foot forward the waist goes back and the in betweens after the contact poses the body goes back in a sort of balance for the meticulous movements. It has to be exaggerated but not to much because it is supposed to be something discreet and the intention is not to attract so much attention.
So I kept looking for reference, and found these in which I relied a lot on:
The 3rd category of sneaks, was the reference pose I used for the inbetween from contact to passing position. This pose requires a bit of imbalance to make sense in the middle of poses that are always so secure, with both feet on the ground – the waist does most of the work.
Blocking
I chose the model David from the resource share library, I was going to use him for the prop walkcycle but then I got scared with the amount of face controls he had, so Franklin was my choice.
This time I decided to do the blocking all together and posed waist and arms simultaneously with the legs orelse the animation never really looks good when pre-viewing it. The better we do the blocking the easiest and quickest it is to polish so, I focused on that.
The normal walkcycle is usually 12 frames per step, but, as this is a slower motion I did each step in 18 frames. These were the main poses:
Final
I had a lot of trouble with the previous walkcycle, because I wasn’t really understanding what was going on and what was wrong with it, so I was a bit nervous for this one. But, the final result for the blocking was much better than I expected, I am quite happy with my small improvement in walkcycles. The fact that I spent so much time in the previous one made me not fall into the same mistakes. Although, this one needs to be slower, for a sneaky walk is too fast.
After polishing my animation was still too fast so I used the region tool on graph editor to extend it and I believe the result was much better.
This was the final result: