Here’s a mopey slightly depressed walk. For today’s session i pored over video reference for 2/3 of it, then spent the remaining 1/3 animating in fits and starts. It was worth really pounding the video reference for as long as i did because it taught me a few things about how to animate someone who’s tired.
In a nutshell it feels like tired people have much less functional motor control, and their actions are weirdly more violent and at the mercy of physics than someone who’s more alert and has more vigour in their body. A tired person will kind of fling their limbs around whereas an awake person will guide their limbs to where they need to go much more precisely. Like, the leg action of my reference walk is swing hip forward, swing lower leg forward, hover for a fraction of a second then drop the foot onto the ground, sending a shock up the body that ripples subtly up the flesh for 1/5 of a second or so. When the leg’s made contact, the knee’s pretty much locked and there’s a heap of side-to-side motion, almost like walking is balancing on poles. It’s like a Frankenstein walk, except the top of the body hangs down too.
But it wasn’t just motion analysis drawing lines on the computer; i was doing sketches of poses too, just to try to capture the physical attitude of moping. I’m bad at sketching and i was bitching about it on Twitter a lot until i had my eureka moment – stop drawing what’s in the picture, start drawing what the picture’s saying.
I like the 9B woodless pencil and smearing pen as media, too. I just hate trying to sketch from real life for the time being because i’m so bad at it. Not to worry – i have a book.
The motion analysis i did within Blender was also much better this time around – i think i found a bug as well where if you have too many grease pencil layers open, one gets shifted off the stack interface and can’t be retrieved. But yeah – lots of layers of grease pencil plus a movie clip on loop sitting behind the 3D viewport is fantastic – scribbling stick figure abstractions over video is a superb way to see what’s going on.
As for the walk itself? Pretty damn pleased with it. The sense of weight in my walks is improving even if it’s still got a long way to go, but as long as i keep at it i’ll get there.
