Walk Cycle Test

In order to help bring our characters to life, we wish to give them animations for when they complete actions including walking and jumping. As stated in a previous post, to create a walk cycle we needed to create numerous frames of our main character during his walking process.

Our Main Character

Here is the initial design for our main character. To create his cycle we needed to save a series of images of the character in his walking process which we achieved through slightly rotating and moving his layers, in this case his legs for walking.

Each layer needed to show a different angle of his legs in the process of his walk. We created 8 frames as a test for the cycle, to see how the frames would be put together in the software and if it created an effective walking motion. The test cycle can be seen below.

We were quite happy with the results in the software, as after some tweaking the character did indeed walk whenever we moved with the arrow keys. Brilliant for a first test, but there are numerous things we need to iron out before the final release. For example, we can add more frames to the cycle to make the walking motion smoother. Our next task in regards to animation will be to look at the monsters we have for use within the first level, and complete all their motion frames.