Moho Forum

I'm sure most of you here are familiar with Williams' terrific "Animator's Survival Kit" but if there are any newbees like myself who are struggling with 2D animation I'm posting a tiny technique from that book done in AS.

The idea is pretty simple -- you can generate a whole lot of different walks easily by simply drawing four positions: the two contact positions and then the two passing positions (those in-between the contacts). Then to modify the walk all you have to do is modify the passing positions.

What I did in AS was create five actions -- the four basic positions as noted above, and then a single, stop position (so your character can stop). By using these five actions on the mainline you can walk as fast or slow as you like, and if you just put references to them you can play with the style of walk by simply changing the middle two passing positions.

If you want to play with this go to the middle two positions and try angling the knee up higher -- *really* high (that's a lot of fun), or tilt the body backwards, or go down instead of up in the pass, or... really whatever you want. But don't change the forward positions.

Note: this ain't art, I just cobbled some silly figure together to illustrate. As Williams wrote, even adding an eye to your figure will change your ability to just analyze the basics of the walk. And this certainly won't interest those with real talent -- I'm just trying to help anyone struggling like I am.

http://www.kelleytown.com/shared%20File ... etest3.zip

You may find some useful info here:
viewtopic.php?t=5771

and I wrote something more here:
viewtopic.php?t=9448

If you search the forum for "walk cycle" you will find even more. But basically you are on the right track, everything else is just refinement and training.

Thanks! I'll look at those threads. As I said, I'm no 2D animator (3D is my forte) but trying to learn and maybe, just maybe, I'll get it before I die (I'm fairly old :>)

Here's the front walk cycle the same way:

http://www.kelleytown.com/shared%20File ... orward.zip

Looking at those threads I'm glad that I didn't duplicate anything there -- what I am showing (mostly) is that you can create a walk cycle with just four positions -- and alter that cycle quite easily by just changing two positions.

I well understand (from reading! not from doing :>) how to create "traditional" walk cycles with many key positions, but I love the portion of the book where Williams shows how much can be accomplished with just the four basic positions (actually he only talks about three, but you need the "other" passing foot position to complete the cycle).

With the computer (and a program like AS) it makes doing a walk cycle pretty simple -- now pretty obviously adding in more keys can result in some smoother and/or better effects, but for simple "get it down and move" sort of motion it's dead solid easy.

The only thing I don't like is how to actually get the motion of the layer correct -- there aren't nearly enough tools in AS for this. You ought to be able to measure the stride and do some calculations (which I try) but if there was a way to lock a layer onto a bone (and animate both the lock as well as the unlock) it would be easy to have a character walk correctly in motion with the background. As it is I don't have any good workflow yet other than trial and error to keep the sliding and sticking problems from happening even on these simple walks.

I rarely use that lock feature anymore because my characters move around too much. (It is there - you just have to select a bone (B) and check or uncheck the "lock" box on top of the main window. The timeline doesn't show the lock keys by default, you have to make them visible in the settings.)

You can use group layers to connect a character with his background. Put both in the same group, and the character's relative position to the BG stays the same. You then can move the group to create pans.