Now that we've laid in the two main poses for each side of our walk cycle,
I'm going to start laying in a little bit of the foundation,
which means adding in the anatomy of the torso,
and the hips, and the head.
These are our three main pieces that
are going to be affecting each other in this walk cycle,
so I want to make sure that we lock them in now
rather than fudging it now and then having to deal with it,
popping all over the place and looking unnatural later.
Anatomy can be a really scary word to use when talking about characters.
It's not really something that you absolutely have to have it accurate
and pay attention to all the time and build all of
your designs around unless you really want to go realistic.
It can pretty much just mean the basis of whatever your design is.
As you can see, over my original keyframes,
I've drawn a little bit of anatomy,
just very basic simple shapes like a 3D rectangle for the hips
and an oval for the ribcage with center lines and shoulder lines,
so I can see which way it's tilting.
The same thing for the head, just a simple shape with a little bit
of an indication of which way the eyes are going to tilt, etc.
As I went through here to add these different elements,
I basically looked at my base drawing.
Since this makes sense as a drawing in general, I was like, "Okay,
let's assess where these pieces of her body would be underneath the outside."
As I'm looking, I see that her shoulders are tilted this
way so I added that as the axis there.
Then I drew her ribcage,
and you can see that she's tilted a little bit towards us,
because you can see her center line right here.
We know that that's the front center,
so she's tilting a little bit towards us so
we can see that this is where her ribcage should be.
Again, I'm making this super simple.
It's pretty much just this oval shape,
a little bit wider at the top and I'm drawing the center line here,
because we can see the center front,
and I'm drawing about where her shoulder should be.
Once we have her ribcage in,
we add in our hips, etc.
The hips can also just be really simple, basically,
literally like a rectangular block, like this.
This is just enough to help us a little bit with knowing the base
of her walk cycle so that we don't confuse
ourselves or lock ourselves into a corner later.
As we go through this, you can see that as we go,
each part tilts a little bit either towards or away from camera so we
can see how her body should follow this anatomy as we're moving forward.
I want her shoulders to have that nice roll, that nice tilt,
so she's not just facing too far in one direction the whole time.
I want to have that 3D volumetric movement
so that it's not super stiff and robotic when we get into the real walk cycle.
This part isn't super necessary if you're doing a more simplified character.
For her, she's a little more anatomically accurate to real life,
so I want to lay it in.
The reason that I'm choosing these three parts
of the body to include in this animation part and the layout,
is that the hips are pretty much going to be driving
the direction and the force of the ribcage and the head.
What happens when we walk is that obviously
our legs are moving and they're pushing us up and down,
etc, and our hips are going to be
the main part of the body that's moving up and down and turning.
What happens is because our torso is sitting on top of our hips,
the gravity and the movement of the hips will affect the torso,
and then the movement of the torso will affect the head.
One thing to keep in mind while we're drawing the motion of these parts is that,
again, everything will move in a loop.
As you can see here, I have the hips tilting where they should here
and then they roll in a circular motion,
is like how we have our arc references here.
They move like this.
If you imagine the center point of the hip,
it will roll in a bit of an oval or a circle,
so I don't think that you need to diagram that out
as much as keeping it in mind here because it will be very small and it will be subtle.
But that is the general direction of what's going to
happen with the hips and with the shoulders and with the head.
If we play through, you can see that it moves in an arc or in an oval motion.
That's just the thing that you want to keep in mind.
For these it's actually a little bit more of an arc like this,
and as long as you keep smooth to that arc,
it's not going to look too bad.
As I'm doing this process,
I'm just doing it on the keyframes that I already have.
If we go through here, we just have this long keyframe,
this cross keyframe, and again,
the most extended keyframe,
and we do that for both sides.
This is literally just the four frames that we already had,
but if you look at it now you see how much more complete
it looks and how much more sense it makes to us and to our brand.
If we lay this groundwork now it'll help a
lot later when we're trying to figure out all the in-between frames.