Creating A Life
Creating a life
part 01
So, as you can see the reference was taken right from the dance style the Running man. Pretty cool. It was quite a challenge to understand the basics of this move. As an animator, i have to break the movement down to little parts which are mostly recognized by the eyes.
running man body lines
part 02
So now if i got familiar with the steps i instantly sketch them down.
running man sketches 01
part 03
Now it might happen that we forget something. Just like now. If we pay a little bit more attention to the style name we gonna see the word " running". What does it tell you? I tell you. Runs are just like walks except that runs ALWAYS have a point when it has both legs off the ground. Lets put them on the sketch sheet.
So much better. If you slide your eyes fast enough through the images, you will see a rough moving. Be careful with the timing. If you are not sure about it, get a stopwatch and count the time as frames.
You know -(24 frame/sec)-
Now i'm gonna set the first keyframes.
Now we got the three most important extremes. But we've still got a lot of work to do. Next, we must to get closer, familiar with the Graph Editor. You have to know what spline means, tangent means, and graph means. With this editor you can make any movements with limited keyframes. But remember. It's just a Editor, not Creator. Now lets see what can we do in the Graph Editor.
So now what we can see here, is the left leg of our alien. Actually just the spline of it.
We selected the "left_leg"
curve at the (Y axis transition.) But first, it's my way, but i use to make the basic splines, all of them Flat. It makes them kinda "smooth", and much nicer. So then.
Lets get back to the main thing we have. The running man, or alien. :) Say, we take one step, but we want to leave our left leg at a place at the highest point maybe for 2-3 frames. To archive that we have to set one more key, OR use graph editor. Change the two weighted tangents at the two highest point. Like it happens with the Y axis transition, the movement will be like what we wanted. The leg will stay a bit longer at one place at the top of it's arc. That way we can change our whole bunch of splines to this. I won't talking about all of the different parts of the alien in the graph editor because that would take more than a week just to read it. For me to write, well... :)
Well, i hope you got to know something new here although, it was a little bit complicated for the first time, but you shall get use to it. So animate. Bytheway, there are two links of the finished animation, check it. Good luck. :)
-Adam Makk
