Need a good reference for a walk cycle

[CarbonX]

Hello,
I am currently developing a game based off of the comic book Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (some of you may have heard of it) and I need to find a good reference to make a walk and run cycle for it. Basically what i was looking for was a couple of pictures of all of the different poses someone can be in while they are running, walking, attacking, etc... I have looked into the animation techniques on this website but have not been able to produce any decent walk cycles from it. ThanX...

[monteboyd]

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your question but I am wondering if you have permission from the author of the comic to create the game? If yes then great, if not then you'll probably find yourself with a cease and desist order before long.

[NCarter]

If you don't mind spending some money, The Animator's Survival Kit (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0571202284/qid=1059466571/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9843280-1276812?v=glance&s=books) is the business. There are pages and pages of examples of how to do walk cycles, as well as all sorts of other useful things.

[kemalyun]

CARTOON ANIMATION by PRESTON BLAIR
THE ANIMATORS WORKBOOK by TONY WHITE

[Carlos Camacho]

Do you have a video camera or digital camera? If so, do what "Prince of Persia" guys did long ago!

[Justin Brimm]

What Carlos mentioned is actually a good idea. Just record yourself or others doing whatever you want to animate. It's also a good idea (recording or not), to go through the motions of your desired animation several times, to try and figure out what's the smoothest possible motion to complete an action.

[Carlos Camacho]

Here is even more advice.. Try this.. it could be fun!!!

First, you want to stand in front of a wall/curtain/building of a solid color. Next, you want to wear clothes that uses colid colors. No plaids, and other funky stuff.

Next you want to buy a bunch of ping-pong balls. Buy some velcro with sticky backsides. Place the velcro on the ping-pong balls. Next stick them on the major joints.

For example, arm, knees, hips, etc.. The more you use (don't go crazy!) the more refined your data will be.

OK, now walk in front of your camera and record. Bring into your Mac, and then use the frames as reference.

To improve this, use a curtain (you can buy rolls) which has a matte color.. blue or green. Ditto for your actor. Then in your video software use a plugin to get rid of everything but the ping pong balls. (Most video apps have various plugins to do this.)

If you don't want to go to the trouble to do this "shoe-string motion-capture" then I suggest finding a site with walk cycles of mammals. I have seen them around.

OT: On that procedure I pointed out. It would be great to have some utility to have "connection" between the balls so that the data could be saved at BVH (spell?) files for 3D software. ;)

Only thing I could think of was to set each frame as a background in Poser. Move your model for each frame, and then let Poser do the hard work of adding in between frames, and then saving the motion file.

Would be neat for someone to do the above and make a tutorial.

Cheers

[Leisure Suit Lurie]

Originally posted by CarbonX
Hello,
I am currently developing a game based off of the comic book Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (some of you may have heard of it) and I need to find a good reference to make a walk and run cycle for it. Basically what i was looking for was a couple of pictures of all of the different poses someone can be in while they are running, walking, attacking, etc... I have looked into the animation techniques on this website but have not been able to produce any decent walk cycles from it. ThanX...

Search for the Muybridge photos. This dude took 1000s of incremental photos of people in motion that you could trace over or study.

Here's an example:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/runner.gif

[NCarter]

Rotoscoping (tracing video frames) or working from real world reference material isn't necessarily appropriate if you want very stylised cartoon animation. It's still worth looking at to get an idea of what's supposed to happen, but I think your animation will look very flat if you do it too literally. You have to abstract and exaggerate things a bit.

That said, you could have loads of fun with rotoscoping - silly walks, exaggerated motions and so on!

[Sawtooth]

Jeez, it's been awhile since I've posted here.

Anyway....

Good reference here... (http://www.sylpher.com/kafka/tutorials/walkcycletut.htm)

.... and a nice tutorial on the basic steps of animating a walk. (http://www.sylpher.com/kafka/tutorials/walkcycle1.htm)

[erazorhead]

just get jhonen to animate it. he did a splendid job with Zim. :p

seriously though, i don't think you'll be allowed to make any money from this game -- if you just make it and release it for free then jhonen might get a kick out of it, but if you're making money off his franchise i'd imagine it would not be so cool

that is if jhonen vasquez still owns the JTHM franchise, who knows anymore.

[CarbonX]

Just to answer a few questions that you guys asked.

first of all The game hasn't really gotten off of the ground yet. second I plan on getting jhonen's permission to make the game. and finally I will not be marketing this game for any kind of profit. It is all just a fun thing to do in my spare time.

[gatti]

There is a great book titled "Cartoon Animation (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560100842)", by Preston Blair, which covers the study of character movement specifically for cartoon characters. It has uselful looped movements which may help you.