Little animation-run and flip

[hrgiger]

Here's a little animation of a character running towards a wall and doing a back flip. I didn't add any motion to the arms, I was just trying my first run cycle. The run I know could use some work. It seems a little slow. I think the flip looks pretty good. I'm just practicing animation now, trying to get a sense of timing. I'm trying to do little excercises with complex actions like the flip so this isn't any kind of short, it's just practice.

I guess a few questions I might have for people are:

1. Is there a method to timing all your actions or is it a lot of guesswork in how long you think something should take? Mine so far has been all guess work. Does anyone use some kind of watch to time things?

2. A run cycle seems a bit harder then a walk cycle because I guess I'm not sure how to know how long the strides should be and how far she should travel with each stride. Is that something you just develop a feel for or is there a method to that too?

Anyway here's the link to the folder. http://briefcase.yahoo.com/dirtyneo It's the one called wall. There's also a another little one in there called warming up if you haven't seen that one already.

[7.62mm]

a few things i notice about the run--

it looks very "floaty" because the feet move at a pretty uniform speed. try having the back foot in each step stick to the ground as long as possible and then snap forward to catch up.

also, in anticipation of a jump, the last couple of steps should be shorter, but they also need to be quicker- you want her to speed up before hitting the wall, not slow down

you mentioned that you hadn't animated the arms yet. i assume that you also plan to animate the entire torso- having her torso flex and recoil from each step lends alot to the sense of gravity. and she should squat down just a bit in anticipation of the jump too.

i hope that helps

the timing on the flip looks nice. keep at it.

[DragonAngel]

One thing you have to keep in mind is that in order for the human being to move forward during a walk or run cycle, he has to fall forward. The action of walking is the action of falling and catching ourselves with our front leg. If you apply this real life concept your running cycle will look alot more realistic.

In other words, the foot in the front does not look like its absorbing the fall and this is what makes it look a bit fake. Make sure you character is leaning a bit when the foot hits the ground. In japanese anime this leaning forward is even more exagerated to give the character Superhuman like speed. The faster you want your character to run, the more he has to lean forward because he has to fall faster. This is how you can achieve the perception of speed during slow motion.

You may also want to give the bounce some follow-through action. Follow-through could be achieve in your warm-up video by letting her hands stay at the extremes longer than her torso. In other words her torso would start to turn back and her hands would have just reached the extreme positions. The top of her legs would also be affected by this action. Also has the hand reach the extreme, the keyframes will become less spaced out. This will make the arms slow down before stoping and swinging back the other way.

On the run cycle have her harms swing more with the follow-through action example above.

Next if you want even more realism, have her torso twist a little bit at the same time maybe strech her body up on each foot hitting the floor and then squash since the force of the foot pushing on the ground will make the gravity act on her stronger.

I hope you understand some of my comments. Enjoy and don't give up, you look like you have great potential.