Kelvin Shadewing's Pixels

[TheShyGuy]

Err...what kind of animal run cycle are you going for? At first, I figured it'd be a horse/pony-like animal but your cycle looks more like the dog reference.- and I just did a cat run cycle before I realized my mistake...


(Theres way too much hop in mine heh)

reference:


*...yeah taken from tigsource after I saw someone else do a quad run cycle for a cat...I wanted to try it out too.*

A few raw notes I took:

• before jump, cat is very squished, hind side higher than head
  
• during the jump, cats on highest point -- entire body in air during jump. -- alot of stretch
  
• on drop, back side drags behind the chest
  
• head drops lower than chest on drop contact
  

..not many notes heh I really just used the reference more than my notes. They were really just key things I wanted to remind myself of incase I overlooked something.

I didn't animate the tail on the first pass. That's something that relies on the rest of the body motion so it can't really be done until the main animation is done (or you're just good at planning things out)

There are a few things off in your keys. The upper body (chest, neck, shoulders and head) are too static. Although the chest doesn't move much in the dog reference (maybe it should, I didn't check any real dog references), his head still moves relative to it. The hips look nice, although in both the dog and cat reference, their hinds raise about as high as the head at some point. Their heads also follow through (drop) on ground contact. Also before landing,they extend/stretch forward outward reaching for the ground--they don't just rotate their forearms up , they reach. Your hind legs look fine. Although the legs could stay back there longer. In fact, there should be more frames with the legs at their extremes than inbetween due to change in momentum and thus requiring force to ease the change. These are important things you're missing. I think after you get that looking good, the rest will be good too.

The tail looks off too. It kinda looks like it goes limp after it reaches the highest point and then all of a sudden, life comes back into it. One way you can easily create drag and overlap (CG-wise heh) is to just offset parts of the tail time-wise with have you have.