MED_1449: Walk/Run Cycles

For this bit of course work, we have been asked to produce a series of walk and run cycles using Maya and ToonBoom Harmony, thus meaning my days of using funny alternative software are officially over. (Three years was a pretty good run, now let's see if I've really got the stuff to be a real animator)

With this in mind...

what is a cycle in terms of animation?

When it comes to animation, the term "cycle" refers to a movement (whether it be walking, running or even standing still) that can easily be repeated in a theoretically infinite loop. These can be used to save an animator time, especially on television where they can go and reuse an animation cycle they created in episode one for episode one hundred and sixty two.

These cycles can actually tell us a lot about a particular character as well as I will show you using an exercise I did during reading week:

Here, we have a group of characters doing the same action in the same direction (that being walking to the right), but what sets each character apart from one another is the way they're all walking. The reason for this is because much like with real people, you can actually tell a lot about a character (whether in a film, game or a TV show) by the way that they walk. For example, the ginger haired man in the middle (Avalon Centrifuge) walks with an air of swagger thanks to his arms moving all around, communicating that he's very confident and full of himself while the notebook headed man (Clive Handforth) walks with his head looking towards the floor and a lack of movement in the arms, telling us he's quite a depressed fellow.

Now that we've briefly discussed the context, let's dive in

Walk Cycle 1: Normal CG Walk Cycle

For this, we had to animate a regular walk cycle in Maya (because I guess blender is just off the table for the time being) using one of the zombie rigs from the movie Hotel Transylvania as he walks around on a giant cube.

At first, I assumed that I could do the same thing I did with Dreams PS4/5 and animate the walk cycle first and then move it later. However, it turned out we were supposed to animate the whole thing using a different approach that involved animating the character walking by taking the legs, move them into position, move the torso and then move the legs again, doing this as many times as necessary until the walk looked believable. After doing a quick bit of course correction, I was able to get this done relatively quickly. We were supposed to do this particular walk cycle over several university sessions, but I was able to get the main walk finished in about one or two sessions (almost as if my time with Dreams actually helped me), thus leaving me plenty of time to do things such as tinker with Maya's physical sky light, fix the materials on the zombie model and even decorate the environment to become Green Hill Zone from Sonic The Hedgehog (1991).

Overall, doing this was quite fun because I got to go ahead and finally start doing a little bit of character animation (even if it wasn't with one of my own), plus I was able to go ahead and do the exercise before the allotted sessions were up, thus meaning the teacher would end up getting me to do a second walk cycle with this model but this time, I would need to make him walk more like an older person. Speaking of, it's time for us to move on to...

Walk Cycle 2: Old Man CG Walk Cycle

This particular exercise proved to be quite similar to that of the previous cycle, but this time I was to make sure that the zombie walked more like that of an old man rather than a more youthful individual. The process was more or less the same but I ended up getting it finished relatively quickly, once again allowing me to re-texture the cube to resemble the chequerboard pattern from Green Hill Zone and even fix the materials once more.

Overall, I would say that Maya as a software is quite good, as I like that I can have a sky light (which adds in a skybox to the whole environment) and I enjoy how intuitive the software is to use once you learn the basics. However, my two main problems with it are that you can't directly render out an MP4 and that you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get it.

With this in mind, it's time for me to move on to...

Walk Cycle 3: Normal 2D Walk Cycle

For this part of the exercise, we are to use ToonBoom Harmony (because OpenToonZ isn't industry standard despite an eerily similar feature set in my admittedly limited experience with both) in order to make two walks and one run cycle in order to learn how to add character to the movements of generic character bases.

Originally, I wanted to go and use my own characters in this particular exercise because drawing 2D characters is easier than making 3D models of them. For this first exercise I wanted to use the character of Hugo The Shape-Shifter because he is one of the more simpler characters I have in my repertoire, but when one of my tutors came by and saw what I was doing, he told me that it wasn't human enough, meaning that alongside throwing away the alternative software I found, I may potentially have to throw away some of my own characters.

Other than that minor detour, I found this task to be simple, much simpler than the 3D Maya walks I did prior, since all I had to do was draw all the frames using the university's large Wacom screens. I did run into trouble after copying and pasting one of the frames but after sorting that out, it was all smooth sailing from there.

Walk Cycle 4: 2D Old Man Walk

Technically speaking, this walk cycle should come last because it was the very last animation I did for this assignment but I figured covering all the walk cycles first before discussing the run cycle would flow much better.

With that out of the way, this particular cycle proved to be quite similar to the regular walk cycle but I was armed with a brilliant piece of advice from one of my tutors (which I received while doing the run cycle), suggesting I should extend the exposure of some of the frames into twos to add more character to the cycle itself. This ended up helping me make the old man seem much more careful and timed.

Run Cycle

For this cycle, I originally figured "well if I can't use my own characters for these exercises, I may as well do the next best thing and use Sonic for the run cycle", but after telling another tutor during a training session, they said I couldn't use trademarked characters either (meaning either way I can't win) so I had to bite the bullet and use generic templates for all of the cycles.

With this in mind, I was able to pull this exercise off relatively quickly, but when I showed it to my tutor, they suggested I extend the exposure of some of the frames so that much of the animation is on twos as a means of adding character to the run (a brilliant piece of advice I would then apply to the old man walk cycle), which ended up improving the whole thing in a very subtle but important way, as now the movement feels more like it has weight to it, especially when I switch from twos to ones and then back again.

Much like my opinions of Maya, I actually quite like ToonBoom Harmony as a piece of animation software, as the tools themselves are actually quite intuitive once I got to grips with it (more so than than with Maya in my case, since all I was doing was drawing stuff one frame at a time). My main gripe with it is once again the fact that it is a subscription based product rather than a perpetual licence you pay for once unlike OpenToonZ (which itself is free). Speaking of comparing ToonBoom and OpenToonZ, another gripe I have with ToonBoom actually has to do with the seeming lack of an option that OpenToonZ has. When using the onion skinning tools in ToonBoom, I couldn't find a way to make it so that it would ghost a specific frame rather than every previous frame at once:

take note of the blue dots above the main timeline

The blue dots (which I can create as many of as I need, similarly to the regular green and red ones) allow me to use onion skinning on a specific frame of the animation without needing to expose all the other ghosted frames at once, a feature I think would be very useful to have on ToonBoom (assuming it doesn't have such a feature already) because it means that I can clearly see the frame I want to use as a reference point for the next one without all the other ghost frames getting in the way.

Overall, this exercise as a whole proved to be quite fun because I was finally able to work more in the mediums of CGI and 2D animation, the two mediums I want to work under in the future (mainly 2D since that's where I feel my characters can look their best). I will admit that actually using Maya and ToonBoom Harmony for a serious piece of work was quite a surreal experience since I had basically spent much of my creative journey using freely available alternatives that ended up doing the job for me but it was quite fun none the less. With this in mind, I'll probably still use the funny alternatives once I graduate because there's no way I would want to pay a subscription fee for something I could easily get for free nowadays, plus using said alternative software has sort of become my thing (especially during my college years).