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Last week, as I have mentioned earlier, I decided to take on creating two animations for our game, currently named Terminal. The main character is of course the most important part and therefore we want the animations for her done as soon as possible. Since I have already discussed the walkcycle I thought I would write something about the run-animation.
I started by using some of the walkcycle frames as a reference for proportions, movement style and placement and redrew on top of that and decided that I would start with three frames and then add if I needed to. I also referenced back to the photos we took for the walk but that obviously had its limitations since you move differently when you run. I got a base for the animation rather quickly and reworked it a few times and got something that looked okay but something was not right. It looked a bit stiff so I tried searching Youtube for a woman running, unfortunately all I could learn from those result was how to do jiggle physics.
After some intense searching I did find some fitness instruction videos that helped somewhat, although I would rather have found someone who was a less experienced runner. The next step was running back and forth through the apartment to get a feel of how you move when you run and running towards the mirror, mainly to study the shoulders and arms. I eventually came to the conclusion that women generally keep that part rather still, mostly just moving the arms.
After that I reworked the frames again and then some more and finally added colour, I think it looks good but it is still not perfect, there is something with the legs going backwards that is a bit off I believe. That was really tricky to figure out how it looks, especially in the straight top down angle, and I will wait to see how it looks and works when it is tested in the game and then see if it needs to be worked on again.
The character is supposed to be a feminine woman who has not had any special training, she is not a competitive or experienced runner and probably has little time to go to the gym. Therefore I wanted her running style not to look too much like the fitness videos I found. I also decided to let her braid fly around behind her as this was something we had discussed and it added a sense of speed to the animation.
Something I would do differently is to take reference photos of someone running but I think it could be difficult due to the movement speed, especially without a good camera. If we had managed to get some decent picture I think it would have been helpful and I think I am going to suggest it when we are doing the animations for the guards.
About Camilla von Paykull
2013 Graphics
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