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:

• Contact
• Recoil
• Passing
• High Point

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:

1. What exactly is each piece of equipment, and what role does it play? Is that a large gemstone, or is it a cloth skirt?
2. What is the shape of each piece of equipment? Visualizing the three-dimensional shape of each piece of equipment can be very helpful when you need to draw that object from a different angle in the animation
3. What is each piece of equipment made of? Leather is more flexible than metal, so it will react in a different way to the motion of the subject. This question is closely intertwined with the final question:
4. How much does each piece of equipment weight? How much weight the character is carrying will affect how and how much it can move. More weight will result in less and more constricted motion overall, whereas less weight means the motions will generally be larger and freer. Which leads us to the next topic...

Weight

Weight is an important factor in running animations. 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. There is really no generic way to define how a character should move in relation to it weight; it depends greatly on the

Chapter 3: 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 along the X axis (the red line) in order to reach the adjacent hex.