<BACK
Animating a Walk Cycle in Inkscape Part 2
13 – Make sure all the second legs are behind the first leg by selecting each one individually and pressing Page Down on your keyboard. You can also give the background legs a darker colour to distinguish them from the front legs.
14 – Now, we can deal with the arms. Using the curve shaped guide you created earlier, on the first frame, edit the nodes of the arm so that the hand lies on the middle dot of the curve.
15 – On frame2 edit the arm nodes so that the hand rests on the next dot on the left. For frame3 place the hand on the far left dot on the guide. For the following frames work back your way back along the dots. When you get to the other end reverse the direction. Use the image below as a reference.
16 – Once you have completed the front arm on each frame, you can get rid of the guides.
17 – We can now work on the back arm of each frame. To do this you should copy the arm from the frame 4 frames in front. For example, to get the back arm for frame1 you should copy the arm from frame5, as you can see below. Do this for all the frames.
18 – You should lower the back arms into the correct position by pressing Page Down on your keyboard. Like the legs, you can fill the back arm so it is slightly darker.
19 – You should be able to see that your character looks as though he is walking. However, if you were to play back these frames now it would look unnatural. This is because when we walk we bob up and down slightly. We are at our tallest when are legs are close together and at our shortest when our legs are furthest apart. Frame 1 and frame 5 should be where your character is tallest, whereas frame 3 and frame 7 should be when your character is shortest.
Draw a line from the top of the head of frame 1 to the top of the head of frame 8.
20 – enter the edit node mode
.
Double click on the line at frame 3, 5 and 7 to add new nodes.
Move node 3 and 5 down about 4 pixels by pressing the down arrow
on your keyboard 4 times. Also move node 8 down about 2 pixels.
This should create a curved line.
21 – Now you should move each character down so that the top of the head is level with the curved line. Once you have done this for all the frames you can delete the curved line.
22 – You have finished animating your character. Before exporting the frames you should save your document.
23 – Finally, you can export your frames as you have finished animating. Select each rectangle by holding down shift and clicking on each rectangle, but do not select the characters. Now you can click on the export button
or press shift + ctrl +E. Make sure you select ‘batch export
selected 8 items’. If the number is more or less than 8 it means
you have selected more or less than your 8 rectangles. Now you
can press ‘export’, and your frames will be exported to the
folder you saved your document in.
24 – Lastly you can join your frames together. A good program to use for this is The Gimp (version 2.6.4). In the Gimp click File>Open as Layers. Then select your 8 frames of your character walking and then click Open. If you look in the layers toolbar you should see that the frames are in order (frame1 is at the bottom and frame8 is at the top). If they are not you can drag each layer so that they are in order.
25 – Click File>Save As and save your work as walking.gif Don’t forget the .gif part otherwise it won’t animate. A dialog box should pop up where you should select ‘Save as Animation’ and then click Export. At the next dialog box click save. You can now find the file and play back your animation.
<BACK
Animating a Walk Cycle in Inkscape Part 2
13 – Make sure all the second legs are behind the first leg by selecting each one individually and pressing Page Down on your keyboard. You can also give the background legs a darker colour to distinguish them from the front legs.
14 – Now, we can deal with the arms. Using the curve shaped guide you created earlier, on the first frame, edit the nodes of the arm so that the hand lies on the middle dot of the curve.
15 – On frame2 edit the arm nodes so that the hand rests on the next dot on the left. For frame3 place the hand on the far left dot on the guide. For the following frames work back your way back along the dots. When you get to the other end reverse the direction. Use the image below as a reference.
16 – Once you have completed the front arm on each frame, you can get rid of the guides.
17 – We can now work on the back arm of each frame. To do this you should copy the arm from the frame 4 frames in front. For example, to get the back arm for frame1 you should copy the arm from frame5, as you can see below. Do this for all the frames.
18 – You should lower the back arms into the correct position by pressing Page Down on your keyboard. Like the legs, you can fill the back arm so it is slightly darker.
19 – You should be able to see that your character looks as though he is walking. However, if you were to play back these frames now it would look unnatural. This is because when we walk we bob up and down slightly. We are at our tallest when are legs are close together and at our shortest when our legs are furthest apart. Frame 1 and frame 5 should be where your character is tallest, whereas frame 3 and frame 7 should be when your character is shortest.
Draw a line from the top of the head of frame 1 to the top of the head of frame 8.
20 – enter the edit node mode
.
Double click on the line at frame 3, 5 and 7 to add new nodes.
Move node 3 and 5 down about 4 pixels by pressing the down arrow
on your keyboard 4 times. Also move node 8 down about 2 pixels.
This should create a curved line.21 – Now you should move each character down so that the top of the head is level with the curved line. Once you have done this for all the frames you can delete the curved line.
22 – You have finished animating your character. Before exporting the frames you should save your document.
23 – Finally, you can export your frames as you have finished animating. Select each rectangle by holding down shift and clicking on each rectangle, but do not select the characters. Now you can click on the export button
or press shift + ctrl +E. Make sure you select ‘batch export
selected 8 items’. If the number is more or less than 8 it means
you have selected more or less than your 8 rectangles. Now you
can press ‘export’, and your frames will be exported to the
folder you saved your document in.24 – Lastly you can join your frames together. A good program to use for this is The Gimp (version 2.6.4). In the Gimp click File>Open as Layers. Then select your 8 frames of your character walking and then click Open. If you look in the layers toolbar you should see that the frames are in order (frame1 is at the bottom and frame8 is at the top). If they are not you can drag each layer so that they are in order.
25 – Click File>Save As and save your work as walking.gif Don’t forget the .gif part otherwise it won’t animate. A dialog box should pop up where you should select ‘Save as Animation’ and then click Export. At the next dialog box click save. You can now find the file and play back your animation.
<BACK