WALKING ANIMATION Pt. 4: Overview of Animating the Walk Cycle
Flash: Intertactive Web Animation Teachers: Ken Kimura
email: ken_kimura at lsrhs dot net
telephone: (978)443-9961 Ken Kimura: XT2221
After going
through the terminology for this unit (P2: Terms & Definitions), you will re-create your character inside of a Movie Clip symbol in the contact position. You
will also create guides that indicate the level of the head, the ground and the location of the feet. Then, by copying and pasting FRAMES, you will
create the halfway point position (P2 Frame 9), which is identical
to the first frame except that the legs and arms are in opposite positions.
Next is Animating the foot position guides (P2 Frame 9). This means that you will animate a set
of guides that slide back and forth to indicate where you will
position the feet on any given frame in your walk cycle.
Next, you will animate the up and down movement of the body and
head (P2 Bounce ). This
movement is broken down into 5 different positions.
Now for
the most tedious part. You will animate the leg and feet, swapping
between different leg symbols and feet symbols (ie. bent leg/straight
leg, flat foot/toes bent, etc.) (Lesson
10 pt. 7). You only need to animate the first of 2 steps (frames 1-9).
Frames 9-17 are created by strategic copy pasting of frames. Here I've added motion tweens for the arms. They swing correctly but they still need some adjustment.
One of the final things in your Walk Cycle is to refine the animation of the arms and hands. As I said, they swing (rotate) correctly, but now you need to adjust
their height level to match the up and down movement of the
body. This is done by adding keyframes and making manual adjustments.