Photoshop: Animation (WalkCycle)

Our second animation task was to create a walk cycle, using a similar guide to the bouncing ball animation. However, for this animation the character would be moving on the spot and the background would be moving across the screen to give the illusion of the person walking. 

tutorial-2 : walk cycle | (angryanimator.com)

Like the bouncing ball animation we first set up our document and brought in the guide. We then converted the guide to a smart object and cropped the document to 10cm wide and centered the first 'contact' pose. 

After this we created a character over the guide, seperating the different parts by layers (Eg. head, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg...) Once this was done we converted the parts into smart objects and added a 'puppet warp' (Edit>PuppetWarp) so we could move the parts a bit like a puppet, hence the name puppet warp. Next, we made the different parts last 3 frames at the start of the timeline, then duplicated the parts in the layers and moved them (on the timeline) so they were after the original parts. This created video groups in the layers, which can be named appropriately (Eg. right leg group).  We could then start animating the second pose 'recoil'. This was done by, moving the guide and then editing the puppet warps for the first copy of each part.  This was then repeated for the following poses.

Screenshot of timeline

After completing the second high-point pose (Since the last contact pose is not needed since it is the same as the first), I added a shadow in the same way as the bouncing ball animation.

Next, I started on my background. I used the crop tool to expand the document to 24cm wide and then added a floor (grass) along the bottom, I then duplicated the grass and combined the edges so that it would loop. I also added a tree and after croping back to 10cm wide I added some sky in the background. I then animated the background to move by adding keyframes at the start and end of the animation and moving the grass and tree by 24cm. However, when playing the animation the background moved too quickly, therefore I duplicated the walkcycle layers within their groups so that there were 3 cycles. I then moved the second keyframes for the background and it was a bit better paced.

I did experiment with adding other elements (like more trees) to the background however I think the more simple background looked better. Though I did accidentally made a tree fly while experimenting, which looked quite funny. I also made a version with some stars.

Flying tree

Stars