Project 2: Walk Cycle

This project had the goal to create an animated walk cycle of a fictional character moving at a natural pace. I chose to animate Princess Daisy from the Super Mario franchise since she had a human-like design with some cartoon proportions, simple to do after the previous project proved to be difficult.

First, the contacts, "down" and "up" frames of Daisy's legs were sketched in Harmony, each drawn with a different color to avoid confusing one for the other. Once the legs were tweaked to look more consistent, I went up the body and drew the torso, then the arms (with different colors matching the sides of the legs), head, eyes and nose. I then drew all the in-betweens, using guidelines to ensure there was a visible push of the legs in the upward frames as Daisy walked. After a few tweaks to the legs, I animated the parts of Daisy's design whose movement depended on her bodily movements, such as her hair and a short dress based on what she wore in Mario Tennis (2000). It was planned from the beginning that she would hold a tennis racket on her left shoulder, so the racket was rotoscoped over a stock photo that moved via peg animation. A crown and earring, two of the more notable accessories on Daisy's design, were later animated with the same peg animation for greater model consistency.  Afterwards, a background was using gradients and pencil lines. Clouds were drawn on two separate layers that moved via pegs at different speeds to indicate a contrast in distance from Daisy. All layers linked to Daisy's cycle were grouped and then moved across the frame to showcase the cycle, making it appear as if she's heading home after a day at the tennis court.

The most difficult part about animating this project was the left arm and the racket she was holding. Not only was the racket a particular geometric shape that could easily be drawn inconsistently, but the movement of her hand and the handle created an illusion that she had a very loose grip and the racket slid up and down. I had to re-trace steps and animate many key frames and in-betweens repeatedly on both layers to make her grip look fixed.