Crow walk cycle V3 — V5

I thought it would be a good idea to refresh myself on birds before attempting the crow's walk cycle again; Jazzy shot some great footage so I spent a bit of time analysing it and trying to break down the body movements.

Looking closely at the movement of the body, you can see that birds really swing their hips when stepping. Curiously, there's not much up and down movement, it's mostly tilting from side to side — their heads actually remain almost completely level as the body moves forward, then they suddenly thrust forward to catch up as the bird lowers its leading leg.

Look at the above clip! Notice how the bird's head is almost completely stationary. 

I also found this much nicer example on Flickr that better illustrates the point:

Image courtesy of Flickr user aaardvaark

The tricky part is trying to incorporate this movement into a fairly limited 2D puppet. One of the first things I noticed is how birds tend to tilt their body forward to follow their hips — my first attempt was to simply try and replicate this movement by rotating the body of the crow. It was hilariously unsuccessful. 

Version 3

Please note I am hideously embarrassed by this.

It just ended up a confusing mess. To be fair it's more to do with the silly way that I keyframed it. There just wasn't enough room between keyframes to have the body point forwards, then back, then forwards again in time with the legs. It just looked like a weird dance. Given enough time and playing around I could probably have  but halfway through trying to fix it I just didn't feel that it was working and so gave up, rather than wasting more time on it.

I briefly considered simply sliding the wing up and down a little bit to try and give the impression of the crow's body tilting from side to side but it didn't really work too well.

For the next attempt I tried to emulate the way that a bird's body sort of shifts forward and backward rather than giving it a lot of up and down movement. I also gave the wing a very tiny amount of rotation to try and give the impression that the body was going more side-to-side than up and down.

Version 4

Disregard the disconnected head for a moment if you will — I was trying something out and unparented the neck from the body. If this motion had been more successful I would have connected it.

This version's looking better but I still was't totally satisfied with it. It certainly could have worked and would have been acceptable, but I just found that it just wasn't "birdlike" enough. It's a bit rhythmic and robotic looking. I also found that the sliding of the body back and forth was a bit distracting — she's walking on the spot, so it didn't really make sense to have it shift back and forth like that.

Version 5

Again, a disconnected head. Taking into account what Sam suggested about an up-and-down body movement I tried replacing the forward and backward motion with an up and down one. I think it looks a lot better — less distracting to look at and it flows quite nicely. I still wasn't entirely pleased, though — the head bob seems a little too exaggerated and I'm not too sure about the legs. Something seems a bit off to me; they animate fairly well, give or take a few glitches, but again, they just don't seem "birdish" enough to me.

I found another interesting reference video; somebody animated a rather lovely walk cycle with an interesting bird rig:

Check out the lovely movement on this one! You can really clearly see the side-to-side motion and how the bird crosses its legs in front of one another. The neck and leg movement are particularly interesting. Obviously it's not a crow, so her head wouldn't move in quite the same way, but the way they've pulled off the head bobbing with an on-the-spot walk cycle is very interesting. Up until now I'd only been pushing it back and forward — it didn't occur to me to try tucking it down and pushing it up as she moved!

It also helped me to identify what seemed to be bothering me about the legs. Notice how the bird doesn't push itself onto its toes at all — the leg is lifted straight off the ground in a wide arc. I think that's the issue with my own cycle — her foot moves in a very human manner. It looks alright and I think I could get away with it but I might like to try tweaking it so that it lifts without the foot rolling.