#walkcycle

ok here is a side by side. new is green bg, old is yellow bg.

while the original walkcycle is peppier and more bouncy, it lacks a lot of the weight and realism i was looking for this time around. i still like it since i dont think its bad by any means, i quite enjoy how it looks, but it's more of a cartoony walk than one grounded in real anatomy and physics.

for the remake, i wanted to focus on how this would move if it were a real animal. that meant putting more thought into the movement of several features, particularly the body in relation to the legs' movement. when the legs push forward, the body has to move out of the way so they can contact the ground comfortably. adding this motion makes steps look weighted and deliberate. the tail was also made a lot stiffer since there would be little benefit in moving it so much. this is a (albeit very derived) theropod, their tails were stiffer than they may seem and that's important to keep in mind. also the tail movement on the og is generally kinda strange even if its fun

i slowed the entire cycle down very slightly since i think the walking speed for this big of an animal would be slower than i put it originally. something ive been wanting to do more is experiment with walkcycle speeds since ive tended to stick to 1 second long for all animals due to how easy and predictable that timing is, which can cause issues for particularly small or large animals that would likely have a much faster or slower walk speed.

some other things i changed were the ears, wings, and overall head movement since the original were far too weightless. the ears are short and would not be moving really at all on their own, so i removed their motion entirely. the wing movement had no relation to any other movements, so i gave them a bit of weight by timing them along with the footsteps and body motion. the head also stabilizes a lot more and has overall more deliberate motions.

i think overall what i got from this is just how interconnected all the parts of the body are when in motion, which seems like an obvious fact, but when you look into it it's really very drastic. the motion of the chest/body was particularly interesting to me as i did not expect the leg movement to influence it so much. i suppose that is something you don't think about much when your own body structure includes your legs being completely out of the way of the rest of you !!!