Walk Cycle Animation
When being challenged to do an 8 frame walk cycle in photoshop, it was really intimidating at first because I am not used to animation at all. First I had to open the timeline view in photoshop by going to the top of the screen and picking the window option and then opening the timeline window, and switching to frame by frame animation.
To help with the actual animation, I used this video to help me understand and get used to how animation works in photoshop, and how to set up a walk cycle.
The video shows how to use the frame by frame animation and shows what recoil and contact frames are. When creating my animation, I made the basic keyframes for the contact and recoil. Each body part of the character was made to be a new layer so that I could move them without affecting the movement of its other parts. For each frame, I copied and pasted the last frame to alter and move it. on recoil frames, I moved the torso and the head up, and on the contact frames, I moved them down again so that it makes the animation bob up and down to make the character’s walk more realistic.
These are the layers for the animation, I had a new group of layers for each frame, and each group has layers for each body part.
The 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th frames are the main keyframes, with the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th being the in-betweens to make the animation smoother. For each frame in the animation, I hid the previous group and make only one group visible so that the previous frame would disappear.
While making this animation, I learned about the transform function in photoshop, which is used by selecting a layer or part of a layer with the lasso tool or any other selection tool, and using ‘CTRL + T’ to allow that section to be rotated and moved. This is super helpful and I will use it in almost all of my art from now on. The transform tool was especially helpful here, as I could rotate layers around a selected point. For example, I was able to set the rotation point of the arm at the shoulder so that it would move like a normal arm would, allowing me to reposition it for the in-between frames.
The Opacity setting was also helpful when creating frames, as I was able to reference where the last placement of the character’s body was. I used this every time I made a new frame so that it was easier to pose the character in the correct place to make it look normal.
For the in-betweens, I mostly used the transform and rotate tools to move the arms and legs to connect to the next keyframe.
Overall I found this task quite difficult as I am not used to animating, but I think overall it turned out somewhat well. I think the connection from the 8th frame to the 1st frame isn’t as clean as I would’ve liked, but it will improve as I continue to make more animations. I’m sure that as I make more and more animations, I will find new ways to make creating the animations more efficient and look nicer.
Bibliography:
https://youtu.be/Llr_KTNtdlk [Video]
