For part of our project we have to take the characters that we have modeled and create a walk, jump and idle cycle for them. so what I wanted to do was look at first how that animal would have walked, jumped and then just stood. So to begin with I looked a different images online and the videos about how a platypus would move. This was quite a difficult task for the platypus as first I had to look at how it would have walked normally but then look at how I would make it stand up and walk so I tried to look for some examples of other people who had looked at platypus' in this way, which again was a challenge.
Duck Billed Platypus
I found this really interesting video about how they would have walked on land and in the water which was very interesting from the National Geographic channel. Only the beginning part is actually relevant, but it seems that they would have actually struggled to walk on land and it would have been very awkward for them, which is something that we need to convey in our own walk cycle for when the platypus is crawling across the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVneqhu9oZk
I then had a look at the First Direct Advert which features a talking platypus, although ours isn't actually going to be talking the walk cycle that they have featured is very accurate and looks very awkward and troubling which is just how they are meant to walk. They are also little bits where the platypus is sat up as if to get a better view of things, which is something else that could really help us in the project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWyg0Y5Tuck
Although maybe not as realistic as we were looking for but Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb is actually something good to look at, especially since were looking into a cartoon aspect. The reason that I wanted to look at this is because it shows a great transition between the platypus standing on all fours to him being on two legs and acting like a human. The way he runs as well is something that we can look at for our second platypus walk cycle where he will be on two legs doing everything. I wanted to be able to show two walk cycles for the platypus as there is two different techniques that we will be using to convey how he moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu7oFgQwo1o
At this stage we also went away and did our own quick video showing how the platypus would walk so that we had a proper video reference to work from. Out of the ones that we looked at we decided to go with the last one as it looked like it could work the best with our character and it also had the most personality out of all of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr0ihebZ0Tg
By Meg Sugden and Stuart Brown
Walk Cycle Creation
We started by creating a walk cycle for the platypus so that we could test it and see if it would work properly for our final video. This was a great way to see how we would want it to move in the final animation and at the moment I am fairly happy with the end result. He is slouched forward and walks quite heavily with a hard thump, which is what we wanted and he also has a small amount of belly jiggle at the same time which just adds to that heavy step. The only thing that I would add to the final animation is more movement in the hands just to make it seem more
Crawl Cycle Creation
Below is the images that go together to give create the crawl cycle for the platypus. I am really happy with the end result and think that it will look great in the final animation. In the beginning we started out by moving the arms outwards to see how that would work but found that we couldn't then rotate it downwards well so we decided to start again and move it forwards that way and sort the legs out which ended up looking really good so we kept it this way. We then started to animate the legs before moving the torso and the tail to move with it.
Below are then the final videos of the different walk cycles for the platypus, the first being the one where he is stood up, the second where he is walking flat out. I think they both work very well and we have decided to try and add in lots of little details to give him as much character as we possibly could overall and in the end I am very happy with this test and really like how the result turns out, giving me confidence that this can be used in our final animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcRo8QYcjyw&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMPzyyKEQbY&feature=youtu.be
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