Quest to learn 2D animation in After Effects Pt.8

After completing the walk cycle I was able to identify a few errors which needed to be addressed. These include:

• The ear clipping into the hair
• Eye moving 
• Front foot sinking into the ground 

To address these problems I decided to go back into After Effects and add more key frames to the areas which moved out of place during the walk cycle, This was able to for the most part solve the issues. I had noticed Mat use a ruler guide in Flash to give a sense of ground to a character without having to draw one in, I looked in After Effects and discovered they had the same feature and it was primarily this which allowed me to keep the character grounded while fixing this walk cycle but also a technique I will continue to use.

Happy with how the character now walks I started thinking about how I will achieve the running animation. To prevent errors such as the hair and ear colliding I decided to merge them with the body layer. Because of how the character was designed I aimed to give the character an exhausted expression including changes to the base which includes:

• Open eye
• Open mouth
• New set of arms and legs

I found that animating the running character became easier once I had learnt from some of my mistakes with the walking animation. The use of the ruler guide had made it extremely simple to keep the character grounded and allowed for minimal correcting. I especially like the slight scale of the mouth to make the character look as if he's panting. I also had the character bend slightly but found it made the features of the face difficult to see.