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.

Working on the second character I quickly realised that the design would be too similar to the previous one and felt it wondered too far from my original set of designs that were intended to be drawn with lines. Going back to the drawing board I decided to redesign the second character to better fit my original vision. While I won't be using this design for my second character there were a few things which I like which include: 

• The brush textures you can get from using a program like Photoshop.
• The line art which defines the face.
• The gradients used to define the body and nose.
• The colours used to contrast the arm and nose from the body.

For the second character I decided to stay true to having a short/tall/happy/sad theme with the second character staying true to its original design. Having learnt a bunch of techniques from creating the previous set of characters I felt confident that I would be able to animate a plain character with black lines which I felt unsure of before. For the design I had decided to go with an S shaped body so the character looked hunched over but still looking where he is going. With this design, the character looks tired and slow a perfect match for the slow walk I had intended for it. 

Having decided on the look of the character I tried giving it the same pass as I did on my previous attempts. While the character does look interesting, It loses something with the absence of the bold lines that creased its neck and torso.

After drawing the character with its arms behind its back I was instantly reminded of the same type of pose an elderly would take as they stood or walked down streets. Their walk was slow and with their short steps kept their hips and head from moving around like you would find in a normal walk cycle. Before creating the rig I thought about how each part would be designed and bend. 

I am fairly happy with the final result. The only things which have stood out to me looking back on this animation are:

• The hair and ear should be put into the same layer. Looking closely at this animation you can see the ear slightly clipping out due to the hair.
• The eye moves around. This is due to the puppet pins in the body morphing it in such a way that the parented eye cannot follow. 
• A possible solve would be to bake the eye into the body but in that case I wouldn't be able to animate a blink.
• If the character can be animated without having to animate the face area then the eye should like fine. 
• The arm might not look as how I had intended. I'll need to look into reference images and see if it can be fixed. Also unfortunate how the arm covers the torso crease since I felt it added to the character design. 

While the legs were originally designed to be straight I felt that drawing them bent gave a sense of weight and fatigue to the character. Due to time constraints I've decided to refocus my outcome into animating only a walk, run and jumping animation for both characters. With the designs locked in thumb-nailing for the rest of the animations can begin. 

Having completed the first walk cycles of each character. The progress of the project was presented in class. In summary I discussed about the difficulties I've faced in regards to keeping the facial elements of the character attached to the main body during animation. The easiest way to tackle this problem was to attach the facial elements to the body but this would prevent the ability to animate those features if the need arises. Another problem I had discussed was difficulties in bringing the original design, mainly the arm into the example below. This was acknowledged in class and attempts to overcome this problem would be the focus for the next iteration. 

With the feedback I had created a list of characteristics that I like about the current characters and also what improvements I need to address with the next iteration. 

• The positive characters walk cycle reflects its intended emotion as does the sad character.
• The detailing on the face and feet work well.
• The slight squash and stretch shown on the positive character gives it volume. 
• The timing between the positive and sad characters match when presented together. 

• The belts on each character are confusing and not necessary.
• The sad characters colour choice is too dark and makes it difficult to see detail on them. 
• Sad characters leg clips during walk cycle.
• Arms are needed to give more character and to follow the original design. 

Taking the feedback into consideration a new character was developed to address these issues. As illustrated below such changes include.

• Making the positive character shorter. 
• Adding a slight gradient on the body to give it volume and depth.
• Have the nose and arms a darker colour than the body to better identify them and give variation in the characters simple colour palette. 
• Have the features such as the facial features, hair and arm scale slightly to give the appearance that the character is swaying side to side as it walked.

The first thing I wanted to do before I imported the character into After Effects was to split the limbs into separate layers such as the:

• Front Leg (FLeg)
• Body
• Back Leg (BLeg)

I was then able to import the PSD into AE. Previously when working with this program I would have saved each layer out individually as a PNG and imported those files into the program but having all the layers contained in a PSD file saves on screen real estate since I only need to import the single file that contains all the layers rather than the limbs individually. While I haven't tested this theory yet I am confident that by importing the PSD into AE you'll be able to edit the original PSD and have the changes show in AE without breaking the animation.

Watching "How To Make a Cartoon | Character Animation - After Effects tutorial [Basic Walk - cycle]" by Ross Plaskow http://goo.gl/gfcyKf I became confident that the techniques demonstrated in this tutorial could easily be transferred to my characters. Some of the things I've learnt by watching this video are:

• The importance of naming conventions since this will help when it comes to identifying puppet pins in your character.
• The importance of an anchor point on limbs since it can directly affect how the joint will move. (Anchor point should be seen as a major joint such as the joint between arm and torso or leg and hip)
• Hierarchy of the parenting of limbs in the correct order. Such as follows:
• Top of Leg
• Knee
• Ankle
• Toe
• Positioning of the puppet pins. It mentions how the pins should be pinned inside the mesh otherwise it will have an odd effect.
• F9 is the hotkey for ease in and ease out.
• Can cut down workflow by copying/pasting keyframes to create cycles. This is extremely useful when creating an animated loop.
• When animating a walk cycle, it is easier to animate both legs the same and once you complete a loop you can highlight the keyframes of the second leg and push them further down the timeline until it fits into a normal walk cycle. An extremely handy tip!
• Moving the root points on limbs to give it depth.
• Basic head turning effect.
• Delaying the limbs breaks the symmetry and makes it look more appealing!

By taking the information from this tutorial, I applied the techniques onto my characters. 

Having pinned the first character I found that it would be tiresome to animate multiple characters due to the poor navigation of the series of layers to access the position and rotation of the pins. Remembering back to some advice that Jason gave me, he mentioned a tool called PuppetTools3 which would make the entire process of rigging and animating a character much more simple than it currently is. Looking at the website I found out that the tool that he recommended isn't free and since this is a project and unsure whether this is a tool I would be using again in the future I couldn't justify the investment.

Looking for alternatives I stumbled upon my next tutorial "Summit 41 - Adv. Character Rigging - After Effects" by Matt http://goo.gl/ZSzRPb

In this video I discovered the free tool called "Duik" http://duduf.net/?lang=en which offered a wide variety of tools which after using found to have an easy learning curve in regards to rigging a character. While you traditionally insert pins into the character to allow animation. With Duik you insert the pins as usual, but the tool has the ability to create nodes for each pin which can then be chained to create an IK limb. 

By using the Duik toolset and applying what I've learnt from both tutorials so far I have been able to create the following basic walk cycles. 

By firstly designing the characters on paper before transitioning into a digital format. I found that the overall character has maintained an organic and fluid like construction. Wanting to achieve a style similar to UPA I decided that the character should have minimal detail in the design opting to instead have the posture and actions define the characters personality. Having features such as the nose, hair and body shape can add to add to the overall character. 

After drawing the characters in Photoshop the original satisfaction from completing the design on paper didn't hold with its second passing. The characters looked generic and flat, I didn't originally intend to have these characters coloured rather thinking it would be nice to have the environment display the colours. Listing out the problems I found that the character:

• Looks flat
• Looks dull
• The arms distract from the overall design
• Can't instantly tell by glance which character inhibits which emotion

To combat this I decided to highlight the basic shape of the character by using solid block of colours accenting the character with only a few black lines to highlight the features such as eyes, mouth and hair. To balance the character out, additional black lines to define his waistline and pants cuffs/shoes were added.



With the creation of the second set of characters. I can comment on how I am able to quickly separate the two apart, along with the posture the colour chosen for both can give the person a quick insight on the current state of mood of the character. I feel that the selection of the brushes used with the carefully placed lines makes the characters quiet appealing and the design seems to work without the addition of arms.

Looking at these characters I'm reminded of the Pixar short "Day and Night"

Having decided to work on 2D animation in After Effects the next goal was to create 2 characters that would be animated. As to what exactly I plan on animating each character with a:

• Walk Cycle
• Run Cycle
• Jump
• Idle
• and if time allows; a basic lip sync test

With this in mind I start the process of pondering what type of characters I wanted to create. Since the focus of this project is for me to learn how to animate in After Effects I decided that the character needed to be detailed enough to illustrate my technical abilities but not be designed in such a way that it then became a distraction. 

By establishing these standards before placing my pencil on to paper I'm certain that it allowed for an easier design workflow. The reasoning for wanting to create 2 characters was to establish a broad variety of personality with each animation. It had been decided before this stage that both characters would most likely be opposites; large and small, skinny and fat. It was these types of pairings I think would best demonstrate my abilities. To accomplish this I started with drawing random shapes which I imagined to be the basic shape/torso of the character. By drawing these shapes I can already start to imagine what type of personality each shape would have and how they might walk, would they walk briskly with their arms swinging from side to side or would their walk be slow with each foot dragging behind the other?

Having created a page of shapes that I was fairly happy with and imagining what type of personality each shape would have I re-drew shapes that I found interesting enough to further expand on being a potential choice for a character. 

I tried to vary my design when it came to creating different characters. I feel as if the majority of these designs are similar, the emotion seems to vary between each one but overall I think I can try to expand a bit further with their look. Perhaps this similarity derives from how each shape or posture can directly tell a person how a character is feeling. An example would be the shapes that are straight with a slight bend to the right have been drawn walking in a positive and strong manner, each one with a happy or smug look on their face. The shapes bent the other way though seem to look depressed and sad. Whilt these are biased due to what was drawn over these shapes as a creator these lines were what had come to me naturally without thinking too deeply on it, the right being proud while the left being depressed. 

Realising this as I drew I tried to pick a shape and push the bend either way to see how the one shape would look both happy and sad. I wonder if adding clothes or hair might help force a change of expression. 

I especially like how a few seem to have a spring in their step while others drag their feet behind. This perfectly captures what a Friday afternoon and a Monday morning can be for the typical office worker. 

I tried to be more aggressive when it came to designing some of the later characters. While they do look interesting it doesn't seem to entice me as previous characters had.

Happy with this batch of designs I'll continue to ponder whether clothing or any additional details should be added by the time I go to finalise my design.