From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Shaky walk

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Shaky walk

- [Instructor] In a pervious movie, I showed you how to use a stagger pattern, a zigzag stagger pattern, to create a shaking effect. And so we had an extremely simple magic carpet walking into the wind, and there was a nice little flutter on him. So I was curious to see to what extent we could apply the same thing to, like, a fully animated walk cycle. Something in the 1940s style, the kind of thing you'd see in the old Preston Blair animation book. So here's a nice example of a sneak, and this is from a course I did previously on how to animate attitude walk cycles. So if you're actually interested in the nuts and bolts of this, that's the course to watch. But let's see if we can take that animation, and now apply a zigzag stagger pattern to it. So we have our sneak walk, he looks really scared. This is a second version. It looks exactly the same, it's not, so what I'm going to do now is overlay the first walk with the second walk, and you'll be able to compare them. Now if I pause the frame, you'll see. That's about as much variation in the second version, so they're very tiny, small changes. I didn't change where the feet touch the ground, I gave the hands a motion, so that we're going to be oscillating now between each of these two versions. And it wasn't very much work to do this, because this was done in Adobe Animate, so all I had to do was to take a symbol for the head and rotate it, and if you're working in CGI, it means that you do one version of a walk, and the second version you just move the head up, move the hand down. But it doesn't really involve reanimating anything. All the hard work was done in the legs, all I've done is nudging some of the edges of the limbs a little bit. So that's the thing with the overlay again, so very subtle. And in the final version, we will then oscillate, or expose from one to the other. So we'll go from frame one of one to frame two of the next. And that's the result. So, notice too the feet, if you watch this foot here as it touches the ground right there, there's a nice little shake if I go through frame by frame, as we go one to the other here, he's even scared to touch down. So it's a really nice way to add just a little bit of extra emotion and intensity to what is already a really, really nice sneak cycle. So you're just taking it up, like, one more degree. And this is the kind of thing that a lot of people don't do anymore, because they'll do the sneak, and go, that's a great little walk and walk away. But there's always that, usually, some little touch that you can add. It's a bit of extra work, for sure, but if you have the time, and if it's going to be one of those scenes that you really want to stand out, definitely keep it in mind.

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