4 LEGGED WALK: First ROUGH Pass

This has been a pretty shabby week, didn't have a flow in life drawing, out of my rythm at work, and then this catwalk lingering over my head. But I finally got started on this and euh...I thought I understood the animal walk, but I really don't. Will check out some more reference before I work more on this :D

This is where I left things off :

I actually first did a straight ahead animation with my simplified skeleton, but I abandoned that skeleton for my second pass on a new layer. I really think that this stretching and contracting in the cat's body was important to capture, so I needed some shapes that express 3 dimensionality.

Things I want to work on:
- Head: I have to look at how the head moves, this kind of feels really unnatural
- Hips: The back hind legs should push up creating a tilt in the hips
- Hind Legs & Arcs, the way the hind legs leave the ground feels a bit clunky.

At least I'll have a better idea of what to look for now.

Just for reference, here is the first straight ahead pass:

It was really useful to help me think through this problem

4 LEGGED WALK: Final Design

Alright..how many weeks have past since I said I'd do a four legged walk cycle? Too many, but finally I have a design and I also did plenty of research so I'm set to start animating on wednesday (life drawing tomorrow).

I changed my lifestyle a bit and now sleep 7 hours a day (while before I slept 5-6 hours or less :P). So my evenings definitely seem shorter, but it's all about trying to strike a balance...anyway, here is some more character development of the cat.

STUDY: Four Legged Walk + Cat Character Design

Alrighty!

I don't think I've ever done so much research :P But here we go, the last batch of the research and I've started to design my cat.

From Richard Williams' survival Guide:

I then wanted to apply his theory on real life examples, so I created a loop from the cat walk images by Muybridge. And I also studied Richard Williams himself doing a walk :P

If you look at my cat notes you'll see that I looked at the individual parts like the spine, head, tail and torso for a guide to my own animation.

Below is my simplified skeleton structure, I'll be dong my rough pass using that template and then draw my character on top for clean up.

For my character design I asked Michelle Henderson from Tengu Arts to knock me up a quick sketch, I then took that sketch and started to explore it for a final design. It's fun to draw other people's characters because you can learn new ways of doing something.

I'll go back and play around with it more tomorrow and do my keys once I'm happy.

STUDY: Four Legged Walk

I kind of feel like I've been slacking off on this cat walk, but unfortunately a large part of this challenge is research. I don't want to just copy from reference, I actually want to understand how a cat moves, and I want to be able to draw it from any angle from imagination...there's no way I can achieve this in a short amount of time. So I'll finish off my studies tomorrow and jump right into the animation then.

I did a couple of different studies:

1) The Aristocats
I wanted to have a look at the shape design and use of line to suggest form. I also tried to apply the skeleton and come up with a basic template I can use for animation.

2) Studies from drawingforce.com on the 4 legged walk, this wasn't a cat but the same principles apply. Again, these are just my notes, please look at the source material for your own research.

Randy Cunningham's Ninja & Sorcerer Sketch

Because I wanted to do this quickly I worked zoomed out with a thick brush, you can see it's very rough and messy but I actually really like the thick lines. I think I might experiment with thicket lineart a bit for future work.

STUDY: 4 Legged Animals

Before animating the cat, I really wanted to have at least some basic understanding of how their anatomy works. These are notes from books I recommend, definitely never use my drawing notes to study since they are bad copies and are just here to show the research I put in before animating. But refer to the original sources.

1) The art of animal drawing by Ken Hultgren (LINK)

2) Notes from Mike Matessi - Force.com. He actually has a book on Animal drawing for animators but unfortunately I don't own it. (LINK)

Anyway, even with this research I wouldn't be able to draw believable cats from my imagination, it would definitely help me when studying cats from life or video. So I'm definitely making animal drawing a part of to do list. But for the animation I'll just need to keep reference beside me and learn while doing. I'll do up my keys this weekend (still need to design the look of the walk) and maybe start the walkcycle in a simplified skeleton version.

Tauriel (The Hobbit) & Legolas (LOTR) Sketch + WIP

Here's the step by step.
1) Gesture sketch
2) I normally don't do step 2 but it's an exercise to check if I still remember the basic anatomy shapes.

3) Rough Pencils

4) Clean up:

5) Flat colors + shading