What Is the Best Way to Go about Animating Walks?

Many animators agree that animating a walk is one of the hardest things to do in animation. Not only do you have to make sure the character’s body mechanics are all working properly together, you must also make sure you imbue the walk with as much personality as possible so that the audience clearly reads their personality.

To successfully animate a walk, one must first analyze the character’s state of mind. This will greatly affect the way the character will carry himself. A depressed guy will move completely different than someone who has just won the lottery, for example. Once you know WHAT your character is thinking within the context of a shot, it becomes very easy to see HOW that character will move. Now, it’s up to you as the animator to act out the walk and see what makes it tick.

A good way to start is by filming yourself and analyzing what it is about the walk that makes it so distinctive. Frame through the footage to get a better feel for your timing. I’ve found that watching video reference in conjunction with thumbnailing your major keys and taking notes about timing is a great combination to achieving a successful walk.

Beware of sticking too closely to the video footage, though. Animation is about exaggeration! Take your keys and really push them. Go for BELIEVABILITY over REALISM. Sell the weight and push your poses to the next level.

Once I finish thumbnailing, I usually proceed to block out my keys (ups and downs), being careful to include the contact positions for the legs so that I know the character’s stride length. I usually stay in stepped/held mode as I add in more keys and breakdowns, constantly going back and forth from key to key, feeling things out and making any necessary adjustments to my timing and animation.

After I get the general feel of the walk working in my blocking, I then begin to spline my animation. I first isolate the root by hiding the other parts of the body such as the head, neck, arms and legs. Since the root drives everything, I try to make sure it retains the timing and overall feel I gave it in my blocking pass while concurrently striving to push my poses wherever I can.

Just a few last things to keep in mind:

-Make sure your character takes time to gain speed or slow down. Use slow-ins and slow-outs to give your character weight.

-You can simplify the ups and downs of the walk by treating the root like a bouncing ball. Pull the handles on the top of your spline to give it that nice bell shape. This of course is not a formula and each walk must be treated appropriately but it’s a good way of avoiding your animation from getting too mushy.

-Make sure to plant the character’s feet once it hits the ground. Nothing destroys the illusion of a walk quicker than sliding feet!

-Lastly, remember to keep the character’s state of mind first and let that dictate the walk.

Guest Blogger Chris Chua

By: Unknown On 12.29

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How Does the Character’s Motivation Affect Its Body Mechanics? (How Do You Determine the Initiation Source for the Movement of a Character?)

Every character is different,and they all have their own unique backstory and history which will affect their decisions, acting choices, desires, and so forth, but if we're talking about body mechanics, there are many things that are simply right or wrong, independent of that specific character's traits or motivations.

Timing is something that will be affected greatly by motivation - a character going up some stairs will certainly climb the stairs at a much different speed if a Tiger is chasing them than if the authorities are waiting at the top of the stairs to arrest him - however, the actual body mechanics would be pretty much the same.

When we talk about body mechanics, we're basically talking about how the body works together. What moves what, and why. These things are based on our anatomy and the physical rules of our universe (gravity, physics, etc), not on personality traits or situations.

The man running from the Tiger and the man about to be arrested both have the same basic body mechanics. Each must put his right foot onto a stair, anticipate down and shift his weight to the right, rotating his chest in all three axis subtly as his left arm starts to move back, all of which allow him to start to raise his left foot to the stairs.

Tiger-Victim will be moving through those motions much faster than the Accused Criminal, but essentially they'll be doing the same thing with subtle differences. Tiger-Victim, because of his velocity, will have his weight much more forward throughout his flight up the stairs, and will have less up and down to his steps, and less obvious weight shifts, probably. Accused Criminal's slow and fearful ascent will be characterized by much more deliberate and obvious weight shifts, body weight that is strictly above the feet, and a much more upright posture.

But these are small differences within the basic body mechanics required to climb a flight of stairs. They're doing the same thing, just at different speeds, and the different speeds demand slight adjustments to the poses, but the basic foundation of what has to happen is still there for each of them. In some ways, Tiger-Victim is simply exaggerating some of the mechanics while toning down others - but the mechanics remain.

As for the general idea of initiating movement, it's usually a good general rule to think of the hips as the engine of any internally generated large body movements for your characters. It tends to be the first thing we move, probably because we can't move anywhere until we unbalance ourselves, and the hips are the center of our mass and weight. In order to move (take any steps), we *must* become unbalanced, and the only way to do that is to move your butt!

Of course, externally motivated movements are a whole other matter, as a frying pan to the head is going to cause your character's head to move before the rest of his body!

So, in closing, I guess I'd say to move your butt and avoid frying pans.

Good luck and have fun!

Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 12.24

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How Do You Accentuate the Facial Performance to Enhance the Body Performance if You Have Already Animated the Body First?

Hi there!

Well, first off, I always animate the body first. Most animators get the body stuff blocked in, and then do a rough pass of limited facial and eye animation before really diving into the facial performance, so it's a very common and normal challenge to be doing the face as a secondary pass.

The main thing to consider here is timing, and planning your facial expressions to hit at moments that complement the body performance rather than distract from it.

For example, if it's important to your story that the character is sneakily stealing a pen from a desk, then it would be a really bad idea to have his eyes doing huge radical movements just as he steals the pen and puts it into his pocket. If the eyes are really going crazy, everyone is going to be looking at his face and totally miss the story point about the pen being stolen.

Beyond just basic complimentary timing, you also want to time the emotional beats of the face to work well with the body. I tend to try to let the face lead the body by a frame or two (or more, in a slow realization or protracted emotional change) with the idea that the face and eyes will betray emotions quicker and more immediately than the body language might.

An example of this might be a scene where the character is realizing that the love of his life doesn't actually love him in return. You've already created the body performance of him eagerly offering her a flower, and then the shoulders drooping as he hears her rejecting, letting his hand fall to his side, dropping the flower, hanging his head, etc. The most important facial stuff in this scene will probably be his eyes searching her eyes for the truth as he hears this devastating news, and then the whatever you choose to have his face do as the news really sinks in.

Does he stare at her, disbelieving? Does he start to cry? Do his eyes defocus and he just stares into the distance? Whatever you choose, you should consider letting that facial performance happen before his shoulders drop, before he drops his flower, etc.

The body performance SHOULD be telling the story in itself, so be sure to spend enough time making sure your body mechanics work and the emotions read in your poses. The face should be kind of the "cherry on top" that really seals the deal, it can't carry the whole performance itself or the character will just feel stiff and lifeless.

Good luck and have fun!

Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 11.59

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Quick Tips on Hand Animation

1) The hand is one cohesive unit

Think of the hand as a whole, rather than a collection of joints and fingers. The movement of each finger and joint often affects the others in some way.

2) The hand can communicate!

The hands can be your single best way of communicating emotion. Whether its a gesture, flexed fingers showing rage, or freezing a hand pose as a way to show the character getting lost in thought - hand animation can really help tell your story.

3) Hands are squishy!!

Obviously, some rigs are better than others, but as much as you can, try to recreate the "squishiness" of your hand in your animation. I'm not even really talking about all the wrinkles and fleshy folds and stuff, but more how the fingers interact with each other and shove each other around. Make a fist, and make it tight, and look at what your fingers do. They don't all just rotate in one axis independently of each other, there is some wonderful complexity going on in there for you to study and recreate in your work!

4) Default hands = bad bad bad bad bad BAD!

Even if your character is saluting or karate-chopping someone, hands are almost never in "default" pose in the real world, with the fingers all straight out. As far as scientists have been able to discover, default hand poses only seem to exist on beginner student demo reels. So if you want studios to take your work seriously, avoid this at all costs!!

5) You don't always have to move the hands

For a lot of us, one of the most difficult things when we were learning animation was trying to figure out what the heck to do with our character's hands. I used to struggle with this as well until Wayne Gilbert set me right and really explained the importance of going through a strong planning process.

The truth is that if you really plan out your work, and film yourself giving a TRUE performance, then whatever your hands do in the reference will feel REAL and NATURAL, and will, at the very least, give you some great ideas of what to have your character do.

That said, there are plenty of times where minimal hand animation *is* what feels most natural, and that's OK! Be careful, though, as your scene can easily lose some entertainment value if you keep the hands static for minutes on end, but at the same time, don't feel like you always have to have the hands moving around and constantly gesturing.

Gestures would be a completely separate post, but one thing I will quickly mention is that you should use them very carefully and, unless going for a specific "talks with his hands" effect, are usually best used in moderation.

Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 09.47

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Forget About Animating the Legs

In your ebook you wrote something on “forget about animating the legs.” Can you elaborate?

Gosh, that's a tough one to fit into a blog post, but maybe I can be clearer than I was in the ebook.

Basically, the idea is to hide the legs of your character. (I create a layer for them in Maya and make that layer invisible). Then you just forget about the legs completely.

So at this point, you have a character with hips, a torso, arms, and a head. The idea is to just animate that, according to the way you've planned out the scene ahead of time, and keeping in mind what you basically will want the legs and feet to be doing once you put them in.

If you follow your planning, and get the body moving around at the correct speed, with the correct ups and downs, etc., and you just work on that until it looks right, THEN you unhide the legs.

Now the legs are super easy to animate. You just set up your first pose the way you had planned out, and then as the character moves forward, you just save a key on the planted foot one frame before the leg would have hyperextended (creating an IK pop, which you want to avoid at all costs!), and then animate it taking the step or whatever.

In other words, if the body is moving at the speed you want, it's going to dictate when you HAVE to pick up the feet and move them, right? So it's kind of removing one layer of complexity from your initial animation pass by saving the feet and legs for a second pass, and on that second pass, the feet/legs are almost a no-brainer because their timing and possibly posing is being dictated by what you've chosen to do with the body.

You'll probably have to make some small edits to the body timing here and there, but if done properly, it should work.

I know it's a weird way to approach, and as I said in the ebook, I thought it was completely insane when Glen McIntosh suggested it to me, but considering he's probably the best animator I've ever worked with, I eventually figured that I should try it, and the Yoda shot I did that way (in Episode 3, where he fights some clone troopers and throws a lightsaber into a trooper's chest) really came together quickly and it ended up being a really cool way to work.

I still only would use that method in an action-heavy scene (lots of running around, jumping, etc) or else for a many-legged character (spider-shaped characters with 4 or more legs work even better for this method!), but in those instances it's a technique that comes in really handy...

Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 09.17

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