Fiziwig's Animator Studio Tutorials

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

If you check out Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum you'll see that the issue of head turns comes up fairly often. It would be nice to be able to turn a characters head from side view to front view in a convincing way. I plan to explore that topic in more detail later on. But for now I'm going to introduce a cheat to make things easy.

If the style of a particular project allows it, you can design characters specifically with ease of turning in mind. As an example, take a look at "The Egg Man" (koo-koo-ka-choo). Here the body is a simple egg-shape, and the head a simple circle. Those two shapes will remain the same no matter how the character is rotated. A 3/4 view of an egg still looks like an egg. Similarly, the feet and hands can be designed to look good without rotation. The only thing that changes is their position on the body.

As an alternative, the feet and hands could be put into a switch layer. Even so, the design should be so simple that moving one or two points is all that is required to change from side-view feet to front-view feet. Face features could be simple shapes that move across the face to simulate rotation: A circle for a nose, an upright elipse for the ears, and so on.

True, this is not the most elegant solution, but it is good enough for now so I can use the Egg Man to explore making a character walk.

I'm going to look at a simple method of creating a walk cycle. Begin with a side view of the Egg Man, properly rigged with bones. You can download the rigged Egg Man from here. Notice that I've only included the legs. The same principles will apply to the arms, so I'm leaving them out for now to keep it simple.

I'm going to make this walk cycle last exactly 24 frames, or one second at the default frame rate. That means that after animating 24 frames, frame 25 will be the same as frame 1. This walk cycle will begin with the legs stretched out to the furthest extent on frame 1. Move to frame one in the sample file and you will see this position.

The reference line at the bottom shows us where the ground is. Notice that the back toe is bent, with the heel off the ground, and the front heel is just touching the ground. Frame 1 from the timeline is copied and pasted into frame 25 to start the next complete cycle. Halfway through the cycle, at frame 13, the legs will be in the same position, but the leg nearest the camera (which I will call the Near Leg) will swap positions with the leg farthest from the camera (which I will call the Far Leg). To make it easier to grab the correct leg when animating, go to frame 0 and, in the Body layer, select all the points of the near leg (the one on the left in the exploded view) and at the top of the main window, just below the menu, enter "Near Leg" in the name window and click on Create. Do the same for the far leg. (I've already done this in the downloaded file.) With these two groups named we can easily select the correct leg by using the drop down list of group names labeled "Select Group".

Go to the bone layer and using the method discussed in Session Three name the Near Thigh, and the Far Thigh, so we will be able to select the bones by name as well.

Now we need to go to the middle frame, frame 13, and copy the near leg position to the far leg, and the far leg position to the near leg. In order to do this we will need some kind of reference marks to show us where the legs go. Create a new layer and call it "Reference". In frame 1, draw a line from the center of the toe of the near leg to the back corner of the heel, then to the ankle, then the knee, then the hip. Stop there and create a shape, giving it an outline color of red, and a line width of 3. Starting at the hip with the Add Point tool, draw another line down to the knee of the far leg, and then down to the ankle, heel, and far toe. Create a shape from this line and give it the outline color blue and line width 3. Your figure should now look like this:

Now we know where we have to move the legs to. Go to frame 13, the halfway point, and using the Manipulate Bones tool, switch the positions of the legs to line them up with the reference points. Once that is done, drag the timeline marker back and forth from fram 1 to frame 25 and you will see we almost have a walk cycle already. But there are a couple of problems.

If you go to frame 7 in the timeline, the halway point between frames 1 and 13, you will notice that both feet are under ground. We can fix that by using the Translate Bone tool, in frame 7, on the Body bone to move the whole body up until the feet are just resting on the ground. After doing that, if you try the rest of the animation you'll see the poor Egg Man is left floating in the air. So we need to go to frame 13 and use Translate Bone on the Body bone to put his feet back on the ground.

Still on frame 7, Right click in the timeline and select Add Keyframe. Then go to the Reference layer and move the points of the reference line to match the new leg postions. Then go to frame 19, the halfway point between 13 and 25, and move the Body bone, and leg bones to match the reference mark, this time using the red line for the far leg instead of the near leg.

That puts us one step closer (no pun intended) to a real walk cycle. The next problem to tackle is that the forward-moving foot is dragging the ground. Scrub the cursor from frame 1 to frame 7 and notice that the near foot (with the red reference line) scuffs the ground the whole way forward. We need to get that foot off the ground. Go to frame 7 and grab the shin bone and pull the foot up off the ground as shown below. Try not to move the thigh bone too much. Then go to the reference frame and move the reference lines to match. Finally, advance to frame 19 (the halfway point of the second half-cycle) and move the far leg to match the position of the red reference line.

Now there's just one little problem left. At frame 10 the forward-moving foot digs into the dirt. We will need to bend the knee a bit at frame 10 to lift the foot out of the ground. Also move the reference lines and copy this correction to frame 22. Then check to see if there are any frames where the feet move either above or below the ground line. If there are, pick the frame where the error is the greatest and translate the body bone up or down to correct. Finally, delete the reference layer and render the animation.

With our walk cycle working, now we only have to add a few motions to get Egg Man starting out from a standstill, and winding up his walk in the standing position again. Simply replace the part of the cycle with the figure in the standing position (at frame1 and frame 7, and again at the end). You might have to adjust a bone position or body translation to keep him above ground, but for the most part, that's all there is to it.

You can download the completed anme file here. In the file I have copy/pasted two more copies of the walk cycle to show how they can be connected togther to give a continuous walk. There is a lot more that can be done with walk cycles to give the character "attitude". The same principle can be used with a longer or shorter cycle to make him walk more quickly or more slowly. To animate running, however, it will not be enough to simply put the key frames closer together. Running is a whole different process, but with what we've covered here, you should be able to adapt the method to a jog or run. Try finding some animations of running and step through them frame by frame to see how the run cycle differs from the walk cycle.

Now that we have a walk cycle with Egg Man walking in place, as if he were on a treadmill, how do we get him walking across real ground? I've built a scrolling path for Egg Man and his friend Sticky (a stick man) to walk along. I want sticky to come from behind and catch up to Egg Man, so I will have to make Sticky's walk cycle shorter. Using the same technique as in the 24 frame walk cycle, I built a 16 frame walk cycle for Sticky. Here they are at the end of the path.

Since each character is walking at a different speed, the will have to move across the background path image at different rates. I started by putting the characters where I wanted them to end up when they reached the end of their walk. Then I added a single shape to the path layer, and using the line width tool, tapered it into a little arrow. Then I moved the arrow to line up with Sticky's forward heel. Since the arrow in in the path layer, it will pan across with the path, marking the spot where Sticky's heel must touch the ground at the start of the cycle.

Now moving backwards in the timeline, find the place where the marked heel first touches the ground. Then use the translate layer tool on the Sticky layer to move him and line up the heel with the arrow mark. Then move the arrow back to the other heel, which is off the ground as the back toe just makes contact. Again, back up the timeline to where this other heel first touches the the ground and translate Sticky's layer to put the heel where it belongs.

Once each step has been done, slowly sweep the timeline from the beginning of the step to the end seeing that the heel of the marked foot stays aligned with the arrow. On any frame where it is not aligned, use the translate layer tool to align it. When you are done your character should walk along the path, keeping his feet on the ground, and synchronized with the scrolling motion of the path itself.

If we throw in some foregound features, scrolling more quickly than the path, and some background features, scrolling more slowly than the path, our walk down a forest path might look like this: Egg Man is in the lead, but Sticky, with his quicker walk, soon catches up.