please go check out @MistCat 's actual meme ^^^^^^^ it's so legit and not covered in my messy handwriting I gotta get back into animation... figured I wanted to practice by messing around with Mist's latest meme because it's so cool *o* Also because I saw a couple of animation issues with the original runcycle (the frames themselves look great though), I wanted to try to figure out what was wrong about it and change it! Notes about that run animation in the N+C.
Scratch Meme: @MistCat Original Art: @MistCat (I labeled almost all of it with writing) Original characters: @MistCat Any other art: me lol Characters I drew: belong to Emara: Emirates Hero (web toon) Animation notes!! (this is only for the run cycle itself, anything else is just me changing it randomly) Number of frames in movement cycle - it's a little easier to work with even numbers in a run cycle, since there are generally a minimum of four key poses: the push up from the ground, the up (when character is @ highest point), the contact with the ground, and the down (character @ lowest point, usually where one leg will pass the other if viewed in profile). So I could draw it faster, and to speed up the appearance of the run slightly, I did a run on 4s which is pretty basic but does convey a sense of urgency! Up+down motion - I think this is mostly what the cycle was missing; remember that the body moves up and down as the character runs, often quite a bit (as opposed to walks where it's less pronounced) because in a run, for every step, there is a moment where one's feet are not touching the ground (which equals more height needed to jump). The more space between the highest and lowest point, the more energetic the run looks. (it's pretty exaggerated in the cycle I did, after a more cartoony fashion; it doesn't need to be that obvious). I noticed that Kalani's body didn't rise or fall in the run much, making it look more like he is hovering and simply moving his legs back and forth. It could honestly be fixed just by moving the existing drawings around, I think? Side-to-side motion - I think the cycle still looks totally fine without this, but I added some to simulate camera tracking. A camera moves at a constant speed, but there's some variation in a human run; there's a little slowing down and speeding up going on, which would create movement horizontally in the frame as the subject goes ahead of or behind the camera position. As you get closer to a subject, it becomes more pronounced! (Again though, it's pretty exaggerated in the cycle I did, for something more realistic you'd want more subtlety probably). Combining the vertical and horizontal movement, you can pretty much track the character moving in an elliptical shape / in arcs. I'm so out of practice that I forgot this for a good two hours and messed up my first attempt very badly ^^; Other things? - objects that drag, like hair and the bowtie, will actually be affected in the opposite way -- when the character is going up, the ends of the hair and the bowtie lag behind the main action, so it looks like they are going down in relation to the rest of the character. Same when the character is going down; the ends of the hair and bowtie lag and appear to be lifted up. Background scrolling - looks really cool, but might be moving slightly too fast for the run speed, as objects farther away like buildings are not going to appear like they are moving as fast as things closer to the camera. wow much words... anyway if you have questions feel free to ask, I didn't explain that well xD
