Learning to Walk

Meet Alinah! She’s teamed up with instructor Matthew as part of Game-U’s Accelerate program. Alinah loves characters, so she and Matthew spent the last several classes learning how to animate a walking cycle for a character she sketched.

Alinah’s new best friend is Pencil 2D, a software program that facilitates frame-by-frame animation. The same operating principle that applies to flipbooks and old-school cartoons (Mickey Mouse!) – cycling rapidly through a series of images, or frames, to generate the appearance of motion – applies to Alinah’s project. She followed a reference to create a walk cycle and sketched a character to animate. Alinah’s a perfectionist, so she spent a lot of time making tweaks to fine-tune the smoothness of her animation and the shape of her character. She’s learning, however, that nothing is ever perfectly perfect (except Mary Poppins), and she’s developed the ability to recognize an acceptable stopping point. A more than acceptable stopping point, in fact! Check out the video of her character. Alinah added a face to each frame and gave her female creation a long ponytail and thoughtful, pleasant features to go with her easy stride. Alinah’s efforts teaching this girl to walk clearly paid off! Next class, she and Matthew plan to add some motion to the girl’s ponytail, which, as anybody with a ponytail knows, should be swinging from side to side in time with her stride.

Your animated girl looks awesome, Alinah! All your hard work gives us the chance to benefit from your imagination and diligence. Thanks for sharing your walking lessons with us. Be sure to keep in touch – we want to see the finished character in action!