My Blog: Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Okay, I know what you people are thinking, this guy is psycho for writing an entire blog on how to make people's eyes blink. Well today I'll teach you how to animate something relevant.

SECOND LESSON!!!

The Walk Cycle! There we go, that will make you think more of me.

When looking at cartoons, you can see in some different shows a completely different style of drawing along with the amount of detail within a character's movement. Look at American shows in relation to Japanese animation (anime). The reason anime is so sparcely animated is because the characters are so freaking difficult to draw!

For example:

Well, this wouldn't be too hard to animate if you mastered the art of figure drawing (But I haven't) So this would be labeled 'Freaking Hard To Animate!' Also, it would be freaking hard to color because of all the shading and shines. (If you can't see all of them, that means that the image got messed up while importing.

Now for an example of an easier one. This character is simplistically drawn with no shading and is disproportinoate to real humans so it is easier to keep in its own proportion.

For Example:

As you can see, this is labeled 'Pretty Freaking Easy to Animate' I should know, I've drawn this character roughly 7000 times for the Redskin Project.

For the Walk Cycle, you need to make sure to have each leg move in front of the other, then follow the ground then lift and repeat.

As you can see below:

I'm not even going to bother animating Haruhara Haruko from FLCL up there, that would take forever! Leave that to Gainax.

Anyway, as you can see above, this sequence consists of 9 drawings but as I use it, it is 18 frames long (24 frames per second). There is a system I've made for this. I usually animate at 18 frames per second but for the movie with the above character, it was raised to 24. So for a walk cycle, 1 drawings per 2 frames... 7 drawings for 18 fps and 9 drawings for 24 fps.

I hope you understand all that stuff but it will only look good if you are good at drawing images that only change slightly. Basically if you are a good animator. But, the trick to this is that for Flash, you can use the onion skin option for this.

For example:

Wow, that looks really cool. But enough with the still images. I'm going to show you the finished product. Enjoy.

Its not great, but its good.

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Tags:Redskin, FLCL, Haruko, Daran, Ixintro Published by dcweber: 10:02 AM Updated On: 5/4/2006 at 1:36 PM