5 Biggest Run Cycle Animation Mistakes)

Hi, I'm Ben Mowry and in this video I'm going to show you the five most common mistakes you can make while animating a run cycle and how to fix them. Some of these you can apply to walk cycles too. Together with Motion Design School we've put together a course teaching frame-by-frame animation from the very beginning and how to integrate that into an architect's workflow. Lesson two is all about run and walk cycles, one of the hardest things to animate. So I thought it would be great to go through some of the amazing assignments from the students and be absolutely brutal. Most of these assignments are the students' first attempt at a run and a walk cycle and this is what my first run cycle looked like so they're way ahead of where I was. Number one, inconsistent leg size. I'm liking this animation by Anur Nadai. There are a few surface level issues. We've got a few frames where the feet aren't completely attached and there appear to be a few masking issues here and in this frame the foot is completely off where the leg is. But these are not really big deals, these are easy to fix by moving a few masks and moving the shape layers a bit. Something looks like it just got misaligned somewhere along the process. And even though these can look way off in each individual frame, when we see the whole thing in motion it's really not that obvious at all unless you're really looking for it. I do notice though that the length of the legs isn't consistent. It's hard to maintain consistent limb sizes especially when animating frame-by-frame. Here we can see this stage left leg shrinks in the next frame and then the next frame the whole leg gets a lot bigger. This is definitely something to watch out for and make sure that your legs stay at the same length throughout. Ideally you want to tackle this in your rough space. Number two, not enough hip movement. I'm loving the leg motion in this assignment from Dennis Dremond, especially how this back foot bends and drags. It's really smooth and the secondary animation on the creature's paws are a really lovely touch. But I don't think the hips are moving quite enough. Now even though this character is doing a bit of a laboured sneaking walk where there would be less hip motion, I still think it needs a fair bit more. Pierre Robert has animated this same character with a lot more hip movement and here we can just really feel the weight a lot more. Number three, feet slipping. Now this walk cycle from Susanna Gamori is excellent. I love the design first of all but especially the legs and how the blocky feet maintain their blockiness as they bend. I really can't fault the poses in the walk cycle at all but it doesn't look 100% attached firmly to the ground. The contact foot slips as it moves and that's because it's moving faster than this rock that's in front of it. When the foot first makes contact here the back of the foot is aligned with this sort of gap where the two rocks overlap but in a few frames here it's further back to the left. If anything it should be further to the right than where it started relative to this rock because this rock is closer and would appear to be moving faster from our perspective. Now this is pretty subtle and I'm nitpicking a bit. Even the Academy Award winning Return of the King has got slipping much worse than this. In this example I would just grab these rocks and make them move a it would be perfect. And also I noticed the background is animated on ones and the character on twos which doesn't really help the slipping. So to fix that I would just add a new adjustment layer over the top of everything, add the effect posterize time, set that to 12 frames per second and that would be fixed. Number four. Feet not moving in arcs. Objects in motion tend to move in arcs not in straight lines. In a walk or run cycle the feet move in a rounded path. The arcs that your feet would take in a walk cycle look something like this. A round motion as they lift up and then lowering to the ground before sliding back at a constant speed because they would be attached to the ground. It doesn't have to fit this shape exactly. It depends on the type of walk and your character design but a rough kind of teardrop shape like this is what you should expect. Yours might be a fair bit more squashed if your character is dragging their feet a bit more and a run cycle would look something like this. The back foot lifting further up here and then kicking upwards more as well. Now I don't mean to keep picking on Anur but I think we can improve this with some really minor tweaks. A really great technique to check your run or walk cycle if it's not looking right to you is to create a new layer and just start tracking the motion of the feet by putting a dot in the position they are every frame. And if we follow this lighter leg we get this. So here it's obvious that these feet aren't moving in a smooth arc but now because we've dissected it it's going to be a lot easier to get it looking smooth. We just need to move these feet to get a more smooth arcing motion. So I'd move this position of the foot up to here somewhere. Maybe these ones down here. Make sure all of these align with the ground and then just adjust a few of these so the arc becomes something a little more like this. And that should really help get this looking more natural. Number five. Not factoring in character design. Now this one's a bit of a cheat because this example here by Vitamurin is not making the mistake at all. They absolutely nail it. Taking this walk cycle in isolation you might say it could be you know pretty janky floaty and weightless but it suits the character perfectly. I love this character design and this walk cycle matches how creepily his eyes are just looking straight into your soul. If we look closely we can see this foot here leaving the ground which wouldn't happen in a walk cycle. When you walk you always have one foot on the ground because otherwise you'd fall over so don't try that at home. And what I really wanted to get across is any technical rule about a walk cycle should be abandoned if it serves the character or the story. Learning character animation techniques are important to know how and when to do that because how it looks and feels to the audience is the only thing that matters in the end. If you'd like to learn more about these techniques and add frame-by-frame animation to your workflow my course Motion Practice is currently 40% off at motiondesign.school. Click the link in the description to enroll today. If you want to learn a whole lot of practical After Effects techniques I've made a short playlist that includes exactly that. Please like this video and consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week. I'll see you in the next video.