Tutorial to draw Walking Avatars

[Donar]

I like to inform the community about a tutorial which just was completed. It's a series of 3 comprehensive articles with the goal of designing moving isometric avatars, like the one shown here:


The index file of the article series can be found at http://herbert.gandraxa.com/herbert/dia.asp.

Let me know if there's something you miss and I might address the issue. And thanks in advance for your feedbacks.

Regards,
//Donar

[Gil]

Wow, that caught me completely off guard. Scientific way to create walking animations?

[Snippa]

Interesting, skimmed over it a bit... will look into it more later.
Seems fairly well thought out though.

[ndchristie]

it runs into only slight trouble in that there is no rotation of the hips or shoulders (which means that the legs and arms have to gain a pixel or two at the extremes), but thats the only crit.  Like Gil, i wasn't anticipating such an in-depth study ^^.  Very, very well done and just a little bit about tilt and rotation would make this the most comprehensive walking tutorial tutorial i've seen on the internet

[dragonrc]

Wow very nice.
I agree with what  adarias said, it would be nice if there was some shoulder movement. And maybe some chest movement.
It would also be nice if there was a zoom function so you can zoom in to the images.
Good job, I'm sure this will help a lot of people

[Helm]

Sadly - or awesomely, depends on how you feel about robots taking over the earth - this is a robot walk. Suitable for robots or people pretending to be robots.

[ndchristie]

Sadly - or awesomely, depends on how you feel about robots taking over the earth - this is a robot walk. Suitable for robots or people pretending to be robots.

What interest's me most is the concepts talked about, if not the product - essentially, it explains the very difficult concept of translating basic animtaion (sideview, frontview, etc) into isometric.  It's nothing particularly new, but it's well explained here.

Combine that knowledge with other animation and stylistic knowledge and one would be as good as anyone else out there (well....with practise anyway).

[Donar]

Adarias and drangonrc, I will attempt to address the tilt/rotation topic as well (assuming you speak of the chest, involving the arms). Thank you for the input!

Helm, the tutorial was actually done to show the non-artists out there (like myself) that we can "do it" as well, just by observation and measuring. However, as said somewhere in it: "I am no artist – if you combine the presented techniques with your artistic skills the result might look better, of course." - If it looks robotic, then it's due to my initial assumption that the trunk does not move too much (plus the desire to keep the number of re-usable parts high and the total number of parts low to increase designing and execution efficiency in say, an isometric game: after all, it affects garment as well). Anyway, thank you for your critique!

Thanks to all for your feedbacks, was motivating, looking forward to more

//Donar

[ndchristie]

hips and shoulders counter each other's movement (when balance is maintained), so actually i would say that the hip rotation is equally important.  to do one without the other would be remiss

[Conzeit]

that's the thing about human movement, everything we do needs balance. Even if you're just raising your arm your shoulder is raising and the oposite shoulder going down, your opposite arm stretching towards the side a little.And if you're enthusiastic maybe even your hip is tilting in the opposite direction your shoulders are.

much more so in fighting situations, I think it's a rule of karate that every movement's strength depends on the way you use your body to balance the movement.

I applaud your bravery Donar, whitout considering yourself an artist you went and researched the facts and got what you needed, I think with time if you just free your perception you could do this more effortlessly, using instinct instead of rationale.

[Donar]

Thanks to you all for taking your time with commenting the article (especially Conceit for constructive criticism).

However, I'd like to briefly address exactly Conceit's statement about "do this more effortlessly, using instinct instead of rationale".

Assume you were to do such  a series, say, 20 different female characters. Of course one can go and do all the designs 20 times, or one can attempt to reuse certain "components", just slightly modifing diameters, lenghts etc., ithout caring too much for angles (which still should be ok for later characters when the frst one is). - Don't get me wrong: I do /not/ criticise your critics (en contraire!). I just want to point out, that the "purely artistic approach" might be too time-consuming when compared to a "semi-automatic design" approach. - The latter has the potentital to get you somewhere within a "useful time". The former, however, definitely will look better, if an artist is at work

No offences intended. - Thanks again for all your comments, the /are/ appreciated.

Regards
//Donar

[sir-knight]

there's no forward momentum in the body (hips and shoulder movement) also when we walk, it's a process of initiating a controlled fall that we catch with our moving legs.

When we walk, our heads will dip forward just a tiny bit on the impact of the leading foot, there is not just up and down motion, but slight forward falling and straightening as we catch ourselves, in most simple sprite animation, a lot of this is not captured because of insufficient pixels or strange use of style/proportions. Because you are drawing something more realistic, you need to emulate life more.

In addition to the forward falling of the head, the hips will also move forward just a bit to catch the fall, what you've got in your animation is a straight up and down motion, and I can see the legs in the figure growing longer to impact, it's giving it sort of a piston effect. Rotation of the hips will compensate a little but movement of the upper body in reaction to the change in balance is what will eliminate the weird look.