User:Artisticdude

Template for future "Animating Running Cycles" tutorial

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Animating Running Cycles

by artisticdude

Note: This is a work in progress.

Introduction

I've heard some people say that running cycles are the hardest animation to make. Personally, I disagree with this notion. Running animations involve a lot of work, more so than most other animations (attack, death, defense, etc.), but generally running animations follow a very strict set of rules. Once you fully understand these rules, creating running animations should be little more than investing enough time to see it through.

Note that I assume at least some level of competence in pixel art and animating throughout this tutorial. I also assume that the graphics program you are using supports layers and transparency, although those features are not strictly necessary in order to create a running animation. If you haven't already, I suggest reading the Basic Animation Tutorial and From Base Frame To Full Animation before reading this page further.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to create a standard south-east/south-west facing run cycle by using the Goblin Impaler unit from mainline. Running cycles for different directions (north-east/north-west, south, & north) are drawn at different angles, but the concepts and theories discussed here apply to running cycles in all directions.

Chapter 1: The Theory Behind Running Cycles

Poses

Wesnoth running cycles are split into four distinct poses. Not frames, poses, as in anatomical positions. These positions are:

• Contact
• Recoil
• Passing
• High Point

Rotation

As you may have noticed in the poses example above, there is a a certain amount of rotation happening over the course of the animation in the hips and shoulder areas. If you

Chapter 2: Understanding Your Subject

This is the most important part of the animation. You can come up with eight beautiful frames for you animation, but if the motion of those frames doesn't read as realistic and fluid when played as an animation, you might as well have just doodled meaningless scribbles instead. Understanding your subject's anatomy, equipment and weight will help you immensely in creating a realistic and fluid animation.

Anatomy

It is vital to any animation that you understand your subject's anatomy: where their joints are located, how far and in what direction those joints can bend and/or twist, whether there is a bone beneath the surface of a certain area or whether that area is composed of flexible membrane, etc. etc. This is especially important if your subject is not humanoid, but even for humanoids with non-human appendages or modified human appendages (tails, enormous ears, an extra set of arms, etc.). Before you even open your graphic editing program, study the baseframe of your subject and learn as much as you can about its anatomy.

Equipment

In addition to anatomy, it is paramount that you understand the equipment your subject is wearing/holding, since this will have a significant impact on how the character actually moves. I follow a list of simple steps to help me understand the equipment of the subject, in the form of a series of questions:

• What exactly is each piece of equipment?
• What is the three-dimensional shape of each piece of equipment?
• What is each piece of equipment made of?
  • How flexible or rigid is that material?
• How much does each piece of equipment weigh individually?

Note that these questions are only to assist in drawing the motion of the object, not in drawing the object itself. To successfully draw and shade an object well, you must ask many additional questions which I won't go into here. If you do not know how to shade an object, I suggest you stop reading this page right now and do more reading up and practice on the subject before continuing.

Weight

Weight is an important concept in running animations, and in all animations for that matter. It can make the subject seem huge and lumbering or light and ethereal. It can give the impression of a stocky dwarf or a nimble elf. You get the idea.

Chapter 3: Direction and Perspective

So now that we understand how the character should move, it's time to start planning the direction of the movment. In this case, we have to have the subject move from one hex to the neighboring south-east hex, from point A to point B.

So what now? Obviously we can't have the unit running at the wrong angle, otherwise it will look like he's sliding when the animation plays in-game. So let's draw a three-dimensional graph to visualize the direction in which the unit will be running:

As you can see, we want our unit to run down the X axis (the red line) in order to reach the adjacent hex. If we were creating a north-east/north-west running animation, we would want the unit to run up the Y axis (the pink line). For now, however, let's stick with the south-east/south-west animation down the X axis.

So this is the path we want our unit to take during the animation: