Walk Cycle

Research:

When designing my characters walk, I wanted to give the character a personality just based on the walk cycle. I wanted my character to have an upbeat, whimsical kind of walk like the character is very intrigued to travel on his mission inside the game.  The main thing my reference photos and image helped with was how to move my character body bounce and the head bop along with the walk to make it appear smoother. 

Examples:

While analyzing this image, I was mainly concerned about doing the arcs and the overlapping/follow-through together while making the walk look clear. The arcs that I created inside my animation is when my character kicks his leg up, his body elongates, his face stretch down (arc and stretch), and his coat becomes smaller (Follow-through/overlapping). These are a part of these animations because it helps creates the illusion of how the body looks different when walking up and down. Then when the character puts his foot down, his body gets shorter and looks mashed down, face is squash, and his face helps symbolize that as his eyes are close and face is wider appearing. (arc and squash). Also, when the character comes down from his walk, his coat becomes bigger showing the motion of his movement affecting his clothes. (overlapping/follow-through).

Early Progression/ Reflection:

This is some of the sketches of how my walk animation will look, I think this was one of the fun parts as it was coming up with ideas and how I want my character to walk. 

If I were to add secondary actions to my walk cycle, the three things that I would add is making my character that would hop up when my character walks, another one would be my character gets scared or twitch if something pops out like a spider coming out of a cabinet. Lastly, grab a magnified glass and walking crouched down and slowly toward the designation.

This is another video that I used to learn more about how to do squash and stretch, I found this video very helpful on how to animate those motions and include them in my walk. I believe the video is at the top of the blog.