Symposium - So how do animals move?

So I have looked in to Edweard Muybridge. His work has given me an understanding as to where the motion picture started and a slight understanding of how they move. Now lets take a deeper look in to this. Lets look more in to how they move and how that can be applied to animation. For this, I will be using the book 'The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams' among other resource materials which will be referenced later.

How animals move varies from animal to animal. It is all about evolution. Take for instance a Cheetah. A Cheetah must be able to move quickly, because its prey, Gazelle, moves fast too. If you look at a Cheetah you will notice certain characteristics of its body:

• Long, slim, muscular legs
• A small rounded head set upon a long neck
• A deep chest
• A long tail
• And a flexible spine

If you notice how it moves. When it runs you can see its back bend up and down. This motion allows him to swing his legs faster. He then uses his long tail to balance himself. Now lets look at the likes of hoofed herbivores. In this case we can take the Wildebeast, one of the Cheetahs prey, but you can see it in others like Zebras, Horses. These are all powerful runners, more-so built for endurance over speed. Because their movement is mostly used to flee rather than to chase, their movement is measured in Gaits. This is what Muybridge was working on. This includes walking, trotting, cantering, and galloping.

When a horse walks, he moves the front leg, and the opposite hind leg together. Trotting is similar but a bit faster, When the horse is cantering, three of the horses legs are off the ground at a given time. Finally when the horse gallops all four hooves are off the ground at a given time, and there is a point in time, just after the gallop, that all of the horses weight is on one leg. This can give you an idea of the amount of force that comes from a horse when running.

Now lets take this in to animation with the help of The Animators Survival Kit. Richard Williams gives a nice brief explanation of how a quadruped moves. He says "Four legged animals walk like two of us joined together - one slightly ahead of the other - two sets of legs slightly out of phase".

This might sound straight forward, but through my practice it is not. We still look for certain things when an animal moves, the same things we look for in bipeds: 

1. Contact Positions
2. Where are the ups and downs
3. Where is the weight
4. Whats the speed
5. Character
6. Differences in build

I will look in to more about this in the next post. For the next post I plan on making my own Rotascope animation. I will explain what Rotascoping is too in the next post.

An extract from The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams

 References

The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams