Walk Cycle / Walking Chibi
6. Walk Cycle
During class, we started on the next exercise, which was a ‘walk cycle’, one where the character walks on the spot. We were to design our own characters, as long as it was not a stick person and have arms and legs of flesh, so as to raise the standards of our animation. However, in class, we first started out with drawing stick figures, just to get the basics right and for Mr. Ahmad to check and verify that we were on the right track, before we were given green light to go ahead with the homework assignment.
I created my character along the lines of what Japanese animators/artists would call ‘chibi’. A rough translation of chibi would mean ‘short person’, or ‘small child’. In my case, I initially created a stunted character. Afterwards, I realised that it was difficult to animate my character because of his short legs, and lengthened them. In other words, what was initially a chibi character turned out to be a manga character instead, since I had to lengthen his legs for easier animating.
The walk cycle done with the character was not as easy as the stick figure one we started out with; there was the concept of volume and positioning of limbs and joints to consider. We had to estimate the rough angle, height and how far out the knee cap should go, as well as how high it should be raised for the walk cycle to look natural. It took me quite a number of tries before I managed to get a satisfactory set of ‘ruffs’ (rough sketches), and many more touch-ups before I produced a believable walk cycle.
/reflections of -theKNEES.