Walkcycles! Today: Up & Down walking

[abstauber]

Hey guys,

here's my most recent walkcycle and I'm already pretty happy with it. It's also the first time that I've tried to add a torso twist



As you can see, each step takes exacly 4 px (if you don't count the shoe tip) to avoid sliding. This also adds a bit boredom to the animation, but at least I don't know any other way to do it.

But obviously the guys at LucasArts knew a way, because here's an animation of Sophia:


All steps seem to have different sizes, but I can't see any sliding in Indy4.  Is this just an engine issue or am I missing something?

Also please crit my sprite

Thanks!

[Andail]

I don't quite understand what you're getting at, but it's probably just me cause I'm a bit confused today.
I'm simply not following this steps/sizes issue.

Your walkcycles are a bit different because Sophia has a more distinct "kick" at the end of each stride. Your character seems to swing her legs much too pendular, as if she was walking in one of those gym machines. Try to make her stretch her legs more, it might improve the cycle.

[mode7]

Your character seems to have stiff legs or something. Normally you bend your legs when you lift them from the ground. The highest point of that bend is reached when the opposite leg is aiming straight down. the rest seems to be fine.

[ThreeOhFour]

I am pretty sure it is an engine thing

AGS will move your character forward by the number of pixels set in the character properties each frame, whereas I guess the guys at Lucasarts could make things work however they liked.

I think your walkcycle looks pretty good though, and probably looks quite fine in game

[InCreator]

Enable "Anti-glide mode" from general game settings?

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/acintro1.htm

[abstauber]

@InC
Hehe, without Anti-Glide AGS would simply stop ignoring the delay values in the sprite views.

Spoiler

Besides I currently can't find that option in 3.2

[close]

With Antiglide you can still glide

@Andail
As Ben said, the char's movement speed defines how many px a sprite will be moved when a frame is changed. In my case, it's 3 px and each bigger or smaller step than that looks a bit misplaced.

@Ben
Thanks for clarification. I'm just a bit afraid that all upcoming cycles might look exactly the same.
By the way, it was you who brought this issue to my attention

@mode7
That's the problem: I somehow can't create an uniform walkcycle with a stepsize of 3px that doesn't look at least a bit weird.


Concluding question: How to strech without having telescope legs and only 3 px for each step?

edit:
Regarding the leg stretching, we're talking about frames 3 and 7, right? Those could indeed show some more knee

[Mr Flibble]

As I recall you can't change walking speed mid-walk. There's probably an incredibly complicated workaround. Infact there is, remember when people were bandying around ideas for making Broken Sword style walking where the character would take a smaller step if they were close to the destination, and come to an animated standstill instead of just switching frames? If you look that up you might find helpful things for making animations with strides of varying length.

[Snarky]

Well, the simplest would be to move the body around on the canvas to adjust the actual movement forward per frame. So instead of moving 4,4,4,4 each pace your character might move 3,5,5,3, for example. (To achieve this rhythm, offset the first frame back one pixel, the third frame forward one.)

My only concern is how it would work with scaling. If the sprite scaling and movement scaling don't match perfectly, you might get flickering or "shaking".

[abstauber]

@Mr. Flibble: Thanks for the tip. Maybe I can dig up something interesting.

@Snarky: Hehe, I had that in mind as well and didn't even thought about the scaling. What put me off is that the only valid preview would be inside of AGS. Maybe that's the next level of animations

@Topic - knee bending:



Maybe it's easier to judge the frame with an anistrip.


I've already made two very suptle changes in frame3 and 7.
Better?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think it looks good.  A couple of things, though:

First the legs:

1.  Her shoe is not touching the ground on a down step and this gives a bit of a floaty appearance.

2.  You want the legs to be at their maximum distance apart on a down step.  Right now, the back leg is at the maximum distance away the frame AFTER and this creates a small wobble and visual offset to the motion.

3.  Adding up-steps when she brings up her knee helps add a nice transition from moving up to down in a sinusoidal fashion rather than just down on a down step.  

4.  Varying the position of the legs at various frames to minimize the viewer's eye from catching on certain frames.

5.  The shape and length of her legs vary a bit too much, especially on the back step.  The more consistent looking, the better.






This edit takes into account the above and also removes much of the shading on the legs just to show shape and form and give you an idea of what I did.


Second, the arms:

1.  Her left arm does not come down as far as her right.  If the legs were offset in the same manner then it wouldn't be an issue since you're foreshortening, but to just adjust up the arm makes her arm look short rather than farther away.

2.  The shape of the right arm changes as it moves, and like the legs you're shooting for consistency here.

3.  Her left shoulder is too visible when she turns toward the screen.






This edit includes the new legs with the wider strides, more consistent shapes and the sinusoidal movement as well as fixing a few of the minor issues with the arms above.

An approach that might help you if you don't do it already is to animate in flat colors without highlights and once the shapes and movement look good, go back and add more color if you want.  None of my walkcycles have ever looked like they were gliding in AGS so hopefully this will help you achieve the look you're going for.

[Andail]

Progz beat me to a paint-over, so his points aren't taken into account here...just wanted to show the cycle with legs more bent and the strides more "kicking".




The wrinkles and shades in her jeans look a bit messy, but I couldn't bother to do them properly, so focus on the motion.

PS:
Regarding the sprite itself, I'd definitely lift her hip a bit and thereby lengthen her legs.
PS2:
Don't ask me where the heck that background and those artifacts come from; I made it at work with a downloadable gif animator and it turned out like this...

[abstauber]

@ProgZ: just made a PDF for deeper consideration I'll be off the interwebs for the next few days, so I'll try to learn as much as possible from your input. The hint with the flat colors is already very valuable

@Andail: But the grain effect makes it look vintage and that's cool
Thanks for the paintover - I'll merge it with the input from ProgZ and see what comes out. Although the back and forth movement of the head looks a bit odd.

Anyhow I'll report back on weekend and post the progress!

PS. Sorry that this is actually such a short answer for all the effort you two put in your replies. I'll make it up soon

* abstauber happy

[Misj']

A bit late, but I wanted to react and...then I forgot. So anyway...

The thing that bothers me most about the walk-cycles (including the paint-overs) presented is, that they're somewhere between unisex and masculine, while the character is clearly female. The problem is (largely) with the up-down movement. With males the up-down movement is more or less equal for the entire body. With females, however, much of this movement is diverted to the hips (in the opposite angle to the shoulders). Consequently the upper-body (and the head) will have less up-down movement than its male counterpart. In the case of Sophia you see that - while there is still up-down movement - her hips and buttocks are involved in the walk-cycle as well. It's because of this movement that - even though her walk-cycle has a tough attitude - there's a certain sexiness to her.

So let's take a look at your sprite: in the design of the character you've added a belt. Normally, one would expect that if the angle of the hips changes (so one moves up while the other stays down/moves down), this movement is enhanced by the belt (since it's 'resting' on the hips). However, in all cycles presented here, the angle of the belt to the spine doesn't change: it appears as if the hips are static. Consequently, if this were a generic sprite (that does not show any gender-features) one would expect this to be a male character.

I'd suggest searching youtube for feminine walk-cycles, and try to incorporate some of what you see into the sprite without going overboard and all runway-modelish (although there's a lot of rubbish on youtube as well where people have the strangest ideas as to how women walk). Or even better: go to the city, sit down somewhere, and just observe (it should be quite simple to figure out what women you think have a nice walk and why (although the why is sometimes difficult to see)).

Ps. If you ever want to create a gay man give him a feminine walkcycle and you're almost good to go.

[Calin Leafshade]

On the subject of slidey walkcycles:

I'm working on a solution to this by assigning a distance value to each viewframe so that a character can have an irregular speed.

Unfortunately doing it this way either involves some heavy hacking with dummy characters or rewriting the pathfinder.

I am inclined to believe that the latter is the better option since hacking stuff is never bug free but unfortunately that takes a while...

[SirHandsome]

I think lengthning her legs and shortening the torso would help alot. also she is very errect, try giving her more of an S shape.
Sophias gate is even, her body is just slightly turned in towards the viewer. this is why if you look closely her left leg is extending slightly farther in front of her than the right.

Oh, and Bend that knee when she brings her foot forward! even bend the actual femur and calf if you have to to get the illusion that she is moving.

hope that helps, Im still learning AGS myself so I cant help on the other part.

[abstauber]

Oh dear, that update took way too long.




Thanks again for all your input. I suppose for the next version I take it easy on the grain shadows

[abstauber]

Update!
I hope for the next sprites I can do it all alone, but for now I need your help.







Thanks to ProgZ, I came this far, but especially the upwalk looks a bit stiff.

Any thought are appreciated

[markbilly]

I really like them but maybe you could emphasise the movement of the upper half of the leg more. You could this by making the light (shading) changes more extreme. In fact, you could do this with the whole sprite.

[cat]

I think the head of the front view doesn't look right. The bandana should be more symmetrical. The original sprite was more 3/4 view, the frontal view has to be symmetrical.

[Andail]

I think the up & down views are very well animated, but I'm affraid the movements are too subtle. While walking around the screen, chances are she will not appear to animate very much at all.