Symposium - The Artefact

The Animator's Survival Kit - Reference Images

So before I begin I would just like to highlight some reference material I used during this process. These images come from The Animator's Survival Kit. These images show some of the things we look for in animal locomotion in the form of an illustration. This lets us visualize what we are trying to achieve.

Extract from The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams

This image gives us an idea of where the ups and downs are, along with contact positions. This gives us a feel for how our animal moves. If we know this, realistically we can apply this to any four legged animal. As most four legged animals move the same, this is really helpful for all four legged animals. You do need to take in to account weight transference. This will be determined by the build of your animal. Is the animal big or small. Fast or built for endurance.

Extract from the book The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams

This image gives us a better feel for timing and spacing. It also gives us a closer look at the ups and downs, and the contact and pass positions through color coding:

• Black for contact positions
• Red for pass position
• Blue for the ups and downs

My process

For this artefact I drew up my own reference images. These images would help me visualize the movements I would like to have in our final game.

Simple line drawing of my animation

I used this drawing to get an idea of what I wanted the animation to look like. This allowed me to see the pass positions, where the pelvis raises and lowers and the way the head moves. This was just a basis, I later advanced on this.

A fleshed out version of the previous drawing

Another planned walk cycle for Haven

This version gives me a better look how the animals muscles would move. Allows me to see where weight transference is happening a bit better. When doing this, especially for a game, it is beneficial to use a pose to pose method of animating. This is where you create your starting pose and your end pose. Then you go back and fill in the gaps between. When you do a run animation for a game, make sure the start pose and end pose are the same. This ensures that the animation loops nicely.



Here is one of the walk animations we will have in the game on a custom rig for our companion character



Here is a CAT rig animated with a walk animation. Here you can see what I have been talking about in action.

This is the timeline for the animation. If you look closely this is made up of one animation looped over and over again.

Here is is the segmented part. This is what the full animation is made up of above. When you look at the animation above, the beginning frame and the end frame in this image are exactly the same.