Richard Williams

Richard Williams
Today we watched three videos from Richard Williams Animators survival guide. From watching the video I took down notes from them, below are my notes from the video.

Video one

Think about tempo of the walk first before working on the walk animation.
If walking on all fours like a dog, this speed would be six positions within a frame.

Always start a walk cycle with the contact the foot touch the ground, such the heals on the floor

When talking about frames and number of frames, it mean from when the frames of the foot comes into contact with the floor.

Walking on 4 frames is like a cartoon run, not possible by human
6 frames is a fast run, hard for a human
8 frames is a normal human run
12 frames is a business like walk, brisk normal walk (march time)
16 frames is a strolling walk
20 frames is tired, or old person
24 frames very slow steps

Video two

Flexibility in walks helps to create personality within the character, depending how you want your character personality to be like.

Experimenting with braking the legs or arms helps create new and wonderful characteristics for a character.

A bounce walk has two bounce per steps, for example if the character is walking along happily, you can place two bounces within a step to create a jolly person. Experimenting with this helps create a better and more interesting result. 

Video threes
Sneaks and runs animations

Animal body parts are all flexible, including humans, so take that into consideration when working on sneaks and runs animations

Think about the weight of the character or animal, if the person is large the fat will catch up with the character when in a run

Small animals will function the most from the rear of the body, E.G a squirrel back legs is where the squirall gets his power to run, jump etc the most, so this part of the body will have more function than the rest.

When a character has eight legs, then the first two leg movement counteract each other, but the other two are a copy making right moving legs


After the videos

Once the videos were over we still had some time left within the lesson to practice some walk poses of our own.

Here a rendered walk I created, this is my first attempt at my characters walk. You can see I have his feet and arms all set and ready for a walk, i was going for a basic walk, but this walk looks pretty unreal. 

This is my rendered comical run, the kind of run seen in cartoon when there running to catch something. The weight of the body is forward and the character would only fall if he stopped running, making it a good comical running effect.

 

 With this character i was going for a walk with some personality, this one being a very happy and jolly person. By making the arms and legs have big movement, you can see this character is proud and pleased with himself.

Outcome: Learning from the best such as Richard Williams, really helps you to understand and process the amount of detail that needs to be taken in within animation, by understanding the correct ways to start and finish your animation and the tweaks that you can conduct to improve your character personality and behavior, really helps me to understand how today's animators create such amazing and life like characters in today games and movies. Learning this new information I feel I know more about how to create the characters and emotions needed to make my characters in future games and projects look and feel the way I want them to be.