From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Breaking joints in a walk cycle

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Breaking joints in a walk cycle

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- [Instructor] When I began to do walk cycles many years ago, I found that the very first few walks I did were fairly boring and standard. You're familiar with the basic walk cycle by now I'm sure. So, I always wanted to break out of that and do walks that had a bit more personality and were more interesting, so in this case I've done something like that with the lower part of the body, and pushed the legs, so let's see how we've achieved this effect. So, here we have the basic contact positions of a typical walk cycle. I've covered walk cycles before, both the typical walk cycle and attitude walks in previous courses that are in the library, and I strongly recommend you watch those if you want to go into real detail with this. But let me show you a very quick and dirty way to snap out of the basic straight-forward walk. So, in this example I pushed the passing position, which is the pose halfway between the contacts, and I broke the knee joint. There's a little tilt forward on the body happening here. That's a good thing to do as well, just to have a bit of flexibility, but this here, this broken knee snapping from this angle to the opposite angle, that's what creates that sense of flexibility and attitude in this walk. Of course, we did the same thing on the other side, and again, we have this very strong knee position up here. These would be very difficult walks to achieve in real life, if not maybe impossible, so this is the beauty of animation, that we can create walks and motions that are basically fantastical, but yet are believable. So, here again we have the poses and I'll just show you the down position, and the down position, the up position, and the up position. So, that gives you an idea of the range of motion that I've built around those contact poses and the passing poses. And again, there's the walk that we achieve as a result. So, these are the images of the walk cycle, the most important being the contacts and the passing positions. I'm just showing you these as a visual reference, so if you want to attempt to create your own version of this, I would use these as a good strong visual reference, and these are our low points and our high points, and now I've put them on the transparency so you can get a better idea of the positions of the various body parts, the arms, and the legs, and so forth, against one another. I've pulled them apart slightly as well, for clarity, so you can see them a little more easily. Also, one quick note, my frame rate is 24 frames per second. That's why a complete step, as you can see here, this is a complete, all the in-betweens as well, on ones, so we're going from one through frame 13, that's half a second. If you're working on a 30 frame per second rate, then my number 13 will be your number 16, so it'll be a little bit further, or 15, or 16, or close to that. And this is the second half of the walk, which brings us through to the conclusion of the cycle. So, that's it, that is a technique, breaking of joints, which again we see happening through the leg here, broken, and then a very nice exaggerated comic step right the way through to complete the walk cycle, and to get you out of the prison of doing very stiff walks.

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