Animating the leg strides (11/25)

This video is a part of the - "Create TV/Broadcast Ready Animations with Adobe Animate" series. In this series, Prof. Greg Araya from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) teaches how to create TV and broadcast ready animations with Adobe Animate. You can download Adobe Animate from https://www.adobe.com/in/products/ani....
Explore the workflow for posing and timing a tracking walk cycle. A complicated workflow like keyframing a walk cycle can be broken down into a logical organized structure.
● Before doing any transformations. manually set keyframes on a layer to correspond with your timing notes. This sets your timing structure and mimics the pose-to-pose workflow of traditional animation. It forces you to think about the overall motion instead of animating straight ahead.
● Keyframe the first contact pose of the leg. Rotate the hip so the foot swings forward.
● Also set the how far forward of center the hip will be on the first contact. Once that is set, go to the keyframe for the second contact pose (leg sweeping back) and move the hip exactly the same distance behind center as it is forward in the first contact pose. (Remember, a keyframe is set before transforming the Symbol.)
● Now your hip position for both contact positions are keyframed. Rotation for the first contact position is set on its keyframe as well.
● Once you are happy with the rotation and forward positions of the first contact, lower the hip to have the foot make contact with your ground plane guide.
● Choosing View|Preview Mode|Fast will render objects on the stage with crisp hard lines. This can aid in precisely aligning and registering objects.
● Verify the keyframe for the first passing pose has the hip on the center guide and the leg straight up and down with the bottom of the foot in contact with the ground guide.
● With the first contact and passing poses set, you have determined the stride length.
● Make sure the guides from the joint gizmo on the foot are visible. Register the horizontal position of your foot position Symbol with the center of the foot guides.
● The horizontal distance of the foot position from first contact to the hip pivot point at first passing is half the stride length. Double it to get the full stride length.
● Once the full stride length is determined, go to the frame for the second contact pose. Keyframe the rear foot position Symbol in alignment with the rear extent of the stride length. Classic Tween the foot Position Symbol between its two keyframes with no ease. This creates the foot’s registration points for each frame of the stride.
● Go to the Keyframe for the hip’s second contact position and rotate the hip back slightly. This is the hip’s position and rotation at the end of the stride.
● The knee may need to be bend slightly. Double-click on the leg Symbol to edit that Symbol in place. You should be on the same frame in this Symbol’s Timeline as you were on the main stage.
● Now that you are inside the leg Symbol, you can rotate the knee joint to make the leg bend.
● Once the knee is bent, back up one. layer in the Symbol hierarchy by clicking on the leg Symbol’s name in the Symbol Path list above the top left corner of the stage panel.
● Rotate the hip to align the center of the foot with the foot position.
● Lower the hip so that the foot makes contact with the ground guide.
● For the second passing position keyframe, swing the hip forward and bend the knee.
● Alt/Option drag the leg Symbol’s first frame to overwrite the last keyframe in the cycle. This creates a temporary target keyframe for the Tween span so the cycle will loop.
● Set Classic Tweens for all keyframes of the hip (leg Symbol) as well as on the keyframes of the knee (the lower leg Symbol inside the leg Symbol).
● Once the leg parts have been tweened, there frames where the foot penetrates through the ground. This can be fixed by converting frames to keyframes and raising the hip so the foot is touching or above ground.
● For the tween from the second passing to the second contact, the foot penetration may need to be fixed with a hip rotation instead of position.
● Continue registering the foot gizmo crosshairs to the foot locator Symbol throughout the stride, usually by adjusting hip rotation. When converting frames to keyframes in order to adjust the Symbol transformation, choose a frame halfway between existing keyframes. This usually results in adding fewer keyframes and smoother animation than adding keyframes sequentially one after the other.
● Check playback by adjusting the Looping Range in the Timeline to exclude the last keyframe. This prevents playing back the same pose twice, (last and first frames), which makes the cycle timing irregular.
● Save your incremental progress as a new file.