Now I'm going to take those same principles that we
just went over from our footage reference,
and apply them to my own character design.
As we looked at before, my design already had her almost fully extended pose,
so I'm going to base my extended pose off of this rather than off of the footage.
You can do pretty much either way that you want.
It just pertains to how you have already drawn
your character and what you want their biggest pose to be,
so it'll add a lot to the character.
Here, I've gone and I've done each of my frames.
This is just so that you have your base idea of what the time is going to look like.
Here I've done my extended frame,
on one side a cross frame,
extended frame on the other side, a cross frame.
You can see that I have a duplicate layer of
this first frame here at the beginning and the end.
That's just for later when I'm going to be trying to loop it a little more closely.
I'm going to turn that off for now,
but that is something that you'll see me repeat over the time.
What I've done here is, I've changed the timing a little bit
from the footage reference because I just want to do my own thing, and that's fine.
For the extended pose,
I want to add a little bit of a pause since she is at her widest point,
and I want to have it ease a little bit differently from where she is crossing here,
because this is where her action is biggest.
We're going to have that hold for four frames instead of for five frames,
just so that we have more of that variation in motion.
This is something called ease,
and it's something that we'll be talking about a fair amount in this.
It's one of the basic animation principles.
It's not something that you need to be
super focused on all the time for this particular thing,
but it will help make your animations look a little more natural.
If I play through here, you can see that I have my extended poses for longer,
and my cross poses where she's moving the most,
with a little bit less frames between them.
So I'm going to play through so you can see how that looks.
She's posing a little bit more on her widest poses,
and that helps give her a little more personality,
a little more of a casual,
and then fast, and then casual type of pose.
I like that personally for her because she's
just walking down the street with a baseball bat,
and that's how she's feeling.
Now I'm going to bring back my ground plane in.
Here you see that I've traced over the different movements of each part of her body.
For me, those main parts are going to be her feet here,
her arms swinging here.
In this case, I'm going to have the bat moving here,
and then her other hand,
It's following a similar arc.
This is early to be getting too far into this,
but we do want to make sure that our key frames are following
a motion arc as you can see it with her hand here,
and her feet here,
so that it has one fluid movement.
When we add our in-between frames later,
we can just follow our arcs and then look really natural,
which should look pretty smooth already,
even though it's low frame rate here.
The way that I started my first frame is,
I already knew that I had this design frame that was
supposed to be here at her most extended pose.
For this, I just went to a new blank frame,
and made sure that I had onion skins turned
on so I could see what was going on beneath it.
You could also just turn the layer on at low opacity in your regular file.
I'm going to go in and trace over this pose that I've already made for myself,
because I cheated and did ahead of time.
I'm just going to draw very roughly the basic pose of her body.
I don't want to get too far into it because we just need to get
the vague positioning and not too much else,
because we're going to be adjusting everything as we go.
You can do it as a stick figure,
you can do it as a really rough way worse than this sketch.
I'm making it look not too horrible because I don't want to look that on camera.
But you're at home, it doesn't matter.
You can make it look as bad as you want.
I'm going to leave out all of the secondary stuff for now.
So that means I'm not going to add in the jacket or anything,
I'm just getting her base body pose.
So you can see here,
I've just on her body,
I don't want to deal with any of the stuff that's going to be
flowing off of her because that's secondary animation,
and I'm not going to touch that right now.
We're just getting in the base animation for the purposes of right now.
That's how I would do that for my initial pose.
Then for doing the cross poses,
if you look here, you can see what I've done for that.
This is something that you can do where you can duplicate the layer if you want to,
and then just grab this,
and move it around to where you need to.
I don't love doing that because I like
having the hand-drawn feel and slight variation between frames,
but you can always reference your other layer and just draw where you think it should be.
If we have our guides turned on right here,
then we know that her foot in between
should be right here, so I'm going to rough that in.
It can be really basic.
Then I'm going to move her head up a little bit because she's going
to be at her most extended on this leg,
so she's going to be pushed higher in this frame.
Again, you can reference your rough poses from the footage, that's also fine.
That'll help you a lot if you're feeling a little lost in the step.
I'm going to draw her torso facing forward a little more,
because she's not turned as far with the pose that she's in in the center.
Draw where her hips should be.
This leg is fully flat and extended,
and this leg is crossing behind.
I'm going to extend her torso because I think her neck is getting a little too long,
for a little bit more depth,
and then I'm going to have her arm in this in-between.
I'm going to draw where her shoulder is because I don't want it to
be too far back or forward.
This is her most flat center pose,
so it's going to be the least interesting, honestly,
but it's going to be the one that you need to lay everything out between these.
I'm drawing her hand right here,
and I'm making sure that it's following this arc that we
drew so that when I do show this in animation,
it's still going to look smooth with the rest of the motion.
For her back arms, it's not swinging.
I'm actually going to have it follow the motion of her shoulders.
They're just going to be in the same position, but a little higher.
This is an area where you can draw over what you had here roughly,
and just bring it up if you want to.
What I'm going to do is,
I'm going to trace over her position here and everything with her arm,
and I'm going to drag it up.
I'm actually going to move it a little bit,
rotation wise, because I want her to,
as she's doing all of this,
have that natural movement or her arm is going to rotate anyway.
As she's stepping higher,
maybe, if her arm was here before,
it's up like this a little bit more because that shoulder is raised a little bit.
Its arbitrary, but we're going to
do it anyway because that's what I feel like she should do.
We're going to see how it looks. This is where I got to with the middle frame.
You can see that her bat is rotated a little bit
because I do want her shoulder to have come up a little bit.
For the weight of the bats,
I pulled this end down a little bit more just as she's pushing up.
So when we put those two together on either side,
we get the impression of our walk cycle that we had from tracing over the footage,
but this time, it's our own character.
Now that we've roughed in the beginnings of this animation,
it's time for you to do yours.
Feel free to use footage reference or feel free to leave it, it doesn't matter.
Pretty much what helps your brain wrap around it is what's fun for you.
After you've done that, go ahead, and create your two most extreme frames of each pose,
just the two at the front, and right in the middle.
Then we're going to get into roughing in the rest of the animation,
and figuring out how the anatomy and the offset of
each bit of motion for each part will affect us going forward.