After fixing Stumpy’s arm he was fit and healthy to start
walking on his own two feet. This was the first time I’ve done a walk cycle for
a long time and I forgot quite how hard some parts of it are! After trying to
get Stumpy to balance at the midpoint I remembered I had a rig that I stuck
into his back with some extra plasticine and it made everything a lot easier. I
animated the walk on 1’s using the new Dragonframe software on my laptop that I
learnt use on the Peppermint shoot. The software is amazing and does connect to
my old dslr (Nikon D80) but as it is so old it doesn’t have a live feed so I stuck
with the LifeCam studio webcam shooting at 1280x720 for Vimeo upload and it
looks great. The bonus of Dragonframe is I can access the webcams setting
through the software and adjust everything with the live view on Stumpy. This
made for a much easier set up and during the shoot having the ability to flick
back and forwards and use reference images and videos was amazing. I am pretty happy with how the walk cycle
turned out, as Stumpy’s rig has no toes he couldn’t quite reach his high point
by stepping up onto his toes so I had to make do just slowing the high point to
when his legs straighten up. The walk cycle is 25 frames in total using tie
downs and was going to be a little longer but it got late and it all started to
go wrong on frame 26 so I called it a night! I’m excited about using
Dragonframe to really push what I can do with Stumpy on his limited set, check
out the test below.
(a time-lapse I shot from my phone using the Aardman Animate It app)
(the time-lapse composited over the animation it's a bit fast)
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