Character Animations and Critique (Part 2)

Animation 4 Walking

For my fourth animation I decided upon a walk cycle animation which is considered the bread and butter of an animator’s tool set. When I was looking at this I knew this would be the best test of what I’d learned since its considered a very difficult task to do especially by hand, to make this animation I first researched into a walk cycle and found an image of 3D walk cycle in 5 steps and so I tried to use this as an base when creating mine and then I slowly started to add extra touches to it like hip swaying and head bobbing to try make it look more believable.

And here is the result

I was relatively happy with this result since its very obvious what he’s doing and it doesn’t look bad but there’s still something that doesn’t quite cut it on this animation and I believe it to be the distance he moves with the steps so I improve o this by shortening the distance he moves in the animation to get a better level of realism I found out once this was completed that there is considered a better way to animate it too in which I would animate the legs moving together and then change the timings on one leg getting an alternating look to the walk, this is something I would like to revisit.

Animation 5 Superman Launch

For my fifth and final animation I decided on a superman launch, which is fun one to make a change from the standard animations I’ve been doing and choosing this was also to challenge myself a bit after the walk cycle because this is the arguably harder project, I first started by looking at as much reference as I could for it which meant looking at still of the old superman films and even watching the new ones, also I discovered it was also used in the matrix to here’s an image before the take-off into the sky.

After seeing this I decided to mix this pose with the classic superman one, this took the character into a crouch pose as if building power to a leap and soar into the sky.

And here is the result

I was extremely happy with this one I thought I capture all the right movements in the body and he took off fast but not too fast so you couldn’t see what was going on, the criticism for this would be that it’s a little robotic and could be a lot smoother I the initial crouch but other than that I was happy and maybe some improvements on the expressions on the face.