Bully Bullfrog – Walk cycle over panning background
November 27th, 2009Check out this video. It sums up the steps to animate a sneaky walk cycle.
Character animation is done using GIMP and GAP. (Yeah, nothing is GIMPossible!)
I first roughly sketched the basic lines, just to have an idea of how the masses will move. I then inked the outline.
I did my pencil test “on twos”, which means 12 frames per second, on 24 frames per second playback. After cleanup I added inbetweens, making it run smoothly at 24 frames per second, or “on ones”.
Finally, I colored the character and added a transparent shadow.
Final compositing is done with Blender.
This image shows the different layers that make up the background.
When it comes to panning backgrounds, it’s like the view from a train window: objects closer to you move faster; far away ones are almost motionless.
The images have to be larger than the width of your composition, so that you can pan them horizontally.
I used this combination of Blender nodes to perform the panning:
Each background layer is on a separate scene, and has its own nodes applied to it.
You may want to add a scene to itself in the VSE to have a live preview of what you’re doing.
So, input is an Image node, and it’s passed to the Composite node through a Translate node.
We first have to place the image in its starting position on the X axis.
Create a Math node, insert the amount of pixels you wish to shift the image and plug its output to X value of Translate node.
To interpolate the animation you have to create a Time node and plug it to a new Math node. Be sure that both Start and End time on Time node match your scene. On the Math node, insert the amount of movement you want and multiply it by the value from the Time node.
You only need to plug this last Math node to the first Math node created, choosing to sum their values.
To make the layers move at different speeds, use different values on the multiplying Math node. Positive values will translate the image left to right, negative values will make it move the opposite way.
That’s all, I hope sharing my experience helps!