Today in Photoshop continuing onward from our bouncing ball project, we moved onto more complicated animation, namely being the animating of a simple walk cycle. To do this we used a template from AngryAnimator.com as a base for our initial animation. Below is shown the template we used for our initial animation.
To animate our person taking each step we first separated each part of their body into their own layer, the head, the torso, and front and back arms and legs. This was done to make animating far easier and to prevent unwanted squash when warping the limbs, additionally converting each layer into a smart object for easier animating . In order to make the arms and legs move we utilised Photoshop's puppet warp tool in order to establish joints on the arms and legs to manipulate and animate. One again using Photoshop's timeline feature we created a 25 frames per second animation of the walk cycle. After that was complete we then created a background for our person to walk in, composed of a sky, a background, a shadow for their body and a floor. I also added a sun into my environment because I thought it was a nice touch. Below is the final product of my initial walk cycle animation.
The second part of our task was "Walking in Dreamland", where we had to animate an original character we designed to do a similar walk cycle without tracing over a pre-existing template, though we were still allowed to use one as reference. For my animation I designed a simple robot character in a cape named Comette. I added floating hands to her design both for to add more detail to the walk cycle and also just because I thought they looked nice. Below is the reference sheet I created for Comette and used as reference for the animation.
For the animation I followed generally the same steps as I did before with Photoshop's puppet warp and distort tools, additionally adding more stretch to Comette's hands as they swung in the walk cycle for more weight and do add more personality to the walk cycle with her exaggerated cheery stride, as well as adding details such as the bouncing of her cape. The main focus of the animation for me was the background, for which I designed a cloudy night-time environment with a moon and stars in the background, as this I believe felt appropriate as a "Dreamland" as the project title implied. The animation as a whole took be about a day and a half, taking into consideration the design process of Comette herself. Below is the end result for my Walking in Dreamland project for the week.
Overall I'm fairly happy with the progress I've made with animation in Photoshop this week, and feel as if my skills are developing well. Hopefully I can use these improved skills in future projects and artefacts to produce high quality work of which I can be proud of.
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