Time to Run

Now that we understand the basic poses and functions of the walk cycle, we can continue our exploration of animating the human body by focusing on a new type of movement; a run. Creating a run cycle is a lot of fun because it allows us to explore a new type of movement. If you take a look at what we are trying to generate, a run cycle is really a series of controlled jumps. Each pose of the run cycle is communicating a significant amount of kinetic energy. The compression of the human form is going to be dependent on how fast our character is running. Slower runs are going to produce more vertical compression, while faster runs are going to appear more even across the arc of the movement.

The same vocabulary, or vernacular, of animating a walk cycle is going to be applied to making a run. We still need to explore the poses and figure out how our "Contact Pose" is going to interact with our "Down" or our "Peak". Use the visual examples in the book to help! Keep in mind, however, that we are looking to create a movement that is infused with a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. Think speed, speed, speed!

This week, we are going to look at all of the moving parts and peices of a run cycle. On the surface, animating a character running down the street seems like an impossible task, but focusing on the core poses will allow us to quickly flush out the overall movement. Remember, the core poses, or Key Frames, communicates the overall movement to the audience. Our animation will be a success if we can nail down the key poses of any animation. Lets jump in!

Project Due: Week 12

Instructions: Turn to page 177 in the Animator's Survival Guide. Closely examine the structure and poses of the run cycle example found in this section. One of the challenges associated with created a run cycle is that there are many different "formulas" for a run cycle. The speed of the movement is going to dictate how many frames you have to work with. Just like our walk cycle, however, we are going to focus on the key poses; Contact, Down, Passing, Up and Contact. These five poses will allow us to quickly generate accurate in-between frames for our animation. Study the poses. Notice how the contact poses feels very strong and stable. The passing pose has a lot of energy in it as does the up pose. Also, the movement and placement of the hips is an important element in a run cycle. The movement should generate a natural "Rise" and "Fall" of the body; a movement that is created through the hips.

Once you have studied the poses, start illustrating the five key poses: Contact, Down, Passing, Up and Contact. Determine the spacing between these frames and begin to drawn all of the in-between frames. In addition to the legs, don't forget to flush out the movement of the arms. This is going to be a loop-able run cycle; meaning that we should be able to repeat these 15 frames over and over again without any indication of repeating frames. Loop-able run cycles are more easily constructed if the character is stationary on the screen, so at the end of the illustration of this movement your character will look like they are running in place. Please ensure you project includes the following required elements before you complete this assignment:

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your Photoshop Document (.psd) and your rendered movie (.Mov) to the Run Cycle dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions: