Run cycle - Part 1

I can think of many ways to animate my character running, but I think it's important to think about his personality and the reason why he'd be running. Although my character has a lot of muscles in his arms from vigorous workouts, I don't think he'd be into cardio exercises as much. If he was running, it'd be purely because he urgently had to get somewhere and for no other reason; he would otherwise walk everywhere with his pride intact. Because of this, I decided to make it a slightly slow run with heavy impacts as he lands.

Once again using my blog post on The Animator's Survival Guide, I familiarised myself with the basic poses needed for a run. Similar to the walk, there are 4 main poses for a run: contact, down, passing and up. I decided to try going for a cartoony run cycle, and found a PDF of Animation' by Preston Blair, which goes into detail about different animation cycles. I found the image below to be a useful starting point, as it outlines the key poses for animation.

After applying the key frames to my first animation trial, I decided that I didn't like the result. I'd made the character lean backwards in order to create the effect that his legs were moving faster than his body, but it ended up looking too strange as the balance would be way off.

After the failure of my first run, I decided to go for a more realistic approach. To start, I looked at an example image from The Animator's Survival Guide which shows a simple run cycle. From there I took a video of myself running in slow motion with over-exaggerated arm and leg movements in order to get an idea of timing.

After plotting out all of the key poses and fixing the curves in the Biped Workbench, I was quite pleased with how the run cycle was looking.

From there, I made the following changes in order to make it more realistic and appealing:

• Moved the hips left and right with each step, tilting the torso and neck to compensate balance.
• Gave the arms and legs more impact on the down pose.
• Moved the arm swinging back 5 frames of animation to get them in time with the legs.
• Converted the feet from normal keys to sliding keys, and made them move at a consistent speed.

The last problem with my run cycle which I still haven't been able to fix is slowdown in the arms when the animation loops. At first I assumed that it was a simple mistake with the graph editor, but on closer inspection, I found that it was all fairly smooth. You can see a video of the problem and a screenshot of the graph editor below, which show the problem in slow motion. I'll update my blog if I find a solution or work-around for the problem.