Fun with Pixel Animation/Running Animation Tutorial!

Here’s a little window into how I work when I’m animating (sort of a tutorial, I guess). I’ve been really trying to nail Roku’s running animation, since players will be looking at it all the time, but every time I look at someone else’s work to do this, it feels like I’m copying.

In order to solve that problem, I decided to animate her from scratch using techniques that I learned as a kid and then solidified when I was an animation student at LMU for about a month doing pencil & paper animation and shooting it with a camera and recording it to videotape.

I wasn’t getting the look that I wanted. I couldn’t find a good model to reference and again I feared that if I looked at anything that was out there I’d just be copying or altering rather than creating.

Then the other night I noticed that if I curled my finger, it actually looked a lot like a running leg - the joints matched up perfectly in fact!

So I studied the motion… And I started with just one leg: Then doubled it, darkened it, and offset the frames, making two: Then added a head to get the proper bounce: After this came an arm which I animated on its own: Finally, I added another arm and the spine: Now here they are all together - like a little evolution chart. God, that’s fun to look at.

Well I hope you enjoyed this look into how I’m working on the game. Pretty soon I should be sending out dropbox codes to some people to check out a rough demo. We’re getting there, folks!!!

Obviously, I’ve put this here as a reference, but since I went to the trouble of not stealing someone else’s work, please do not steal mine. Unless I specifically allow you to use this, please do not use any of this work in your projects (commercial or not). Thank you.

Ask questions and post comments please! And thanks for reading/sharing! Everything helps!