Crow walk cycle V8

Version 8

Finally! It only took me all damn day.

Personally, I think it's looking much, much better. Still problems with the legs and feet — as I said in my earlier post, I need to watch the back foot as it sort of slides forward before it even lifts off the ground. I either need to re-adjust the position of the toes so it doesn't move until it's lifted, or flatten it entirely and have it lift straight off the ground without pushing up onto her toes first.

This wasn't quite as bad a job as I thought it would be. It was a bit tricky initially, but eventually I sort of figured it out. Adjusting the position of the body layer itself screwed up the keyframes on absolutely everything, so to get around that I just created a new composition containing the walk cycle (minus the head, which I would need to animate individually).

The composition "body_walk" contains all the layers and keyframes for the body itself. Placing it within a new composition allowed me to move the crow around freely without messing up the animation. The head layers are left separate so that I could animate it independent of the body.

To attach the head to the body, I created a new "null object" (named "head_pos_control") to act as a control for the head's overall position. The "neck" object is the overall parent of the head and all its features, so by making the null object a parent of the neck I was able to move the whole lot into postion over the body whilst retaining the ability to animate each component individually. 

I then made the null object a child of the body_walk composition. This ensured that as I moved the body across the screen, the head would follow.

To line the feet up, I placed keyframes all along the walk cycle composition corresponding to the keyframes of the animation (contact positions etc.) After Effects lacks an onion skin so I had to sort of invent my own:

By dropping the opacity of the composition, duplicating it and then dragging the new one back on the timeline so that the next keyframe was aligned with the previous keyframe, you get a sort of faux onion skin effect and I was able to line up the feet quite neatly!

It's a bit complicated to explain, so I actually attempted to record my screen whilst I was doing it. Mostly as an experiment (just got a new piece of software I was dying to try out!), but also to save me the time of having to go back and screen shot everything. I'm lazy.

Sorry about the huge watermark... still, it was fun (if a bit weird) to do! Hopefully you guys might find it somewhat helpful?

I'm tired now. BED.