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Warning: There is a GIF at the bottom of the post with flashing images.
Like many of you, I was inspired by the impressive visuals of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (which, by the way, has a website built using gskinner’s CreateJS libraries) and wanted to try to apply some of that style into one of my animations.
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On top of that, I’ve had the idea of making a walk cycle with an astronaut for a while and decided it was time to make it.
Section One: Using Blender
Making the Model and Rigging It
To start off, I made a rough character sketch to get a general layout of what my final rigged character should look like.
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Once I had finished my character design, I was ready to use it as modelling reference. I imported my sketch as an image reference and got to work modelling my character based on the reference. My approach to modelling is fairly straightforward and is similar to how I approach drawing. I focus on getting the large main shapes right, then work towards details until I’m satisfied. Since I knew I was going to be drawing over my 3D animations later, I wasn’t worried about having a polished model.
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I then applied materials because animating grey meshes isn’t fun.
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Once materials were applied, I made an armature so that my character could actually move. After, I parented my mesh to the armature and weight painted the model so that the right parts of the mesh were being affected by the right bones when they were moved.
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Animation Time
After rigging, I took out some reference to make sure the walk cycle looked correct. I made sure to have Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Kit walk cycle diagram visible at all times while animating so that I could ensure proper motion and timing of my character. At this stage, my focus was on exaggeration and timing and less about details and accuracy.
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After animating the model, I needed some terrain for it to walk on. I thought some kind of moon or asteroid seemed fitting so I went to work making a lumpy spherical mesh.
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To make the terrain mesh, I started with a sphere and then added both a Subdivision modifier and a Displace modifier with a cloud texture to get a less uniform look to it.
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Once the terrain was done, I applied a simple animation to it so that it revolved every 48 frames.
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I wanted the camera for the final animation to revolve around my character, so I created a camera track. To make the track, I made a circle curve that went around my terrain and character. Next, I animated the track so it spun 360 degrees every 48 frames to coincide with the terrain mesh and the character walk cycle.
Then, I created a camera and set its parent to the circular curve so that it followed the motion of the curve.
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The last part of the setup was adding a bit more tracking to the camera. I added a child constraint to the camera so that it tracked the astronaut model so that it would bob up and down with the motion of the character.
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Finally, the setup was complete and the animation was ready to be exported as a PNG sequence.
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I saved the PNGs in a separate folder so that it was easy to find them all in one place
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Section Two: Styling the Frames in Photoshop
Now comes the fun part! I imported the saved PNG sequence into Photoshop in a stack. That way, all the frames were in one Photoshop file stacked in order with layers.
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Once I had the frames as separate layers, I could stylize each individual layer however I wanted. That included drawing, applying filters and generally having fun with different styles. It was a fun little exercise trying to create a wide variety of styles using different combinations of filters and workflows. I had to keep track of the ordering and numbering of the layers so that I wasn’t misplacing or losing frames.
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After a couple of hours of work, I had stylized each of the 48 frames and was ready to export the final PNG sequence. I saved all the individual frames/layers as their own PNGs in a new folder with correct numerical labels.
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Putting it All Together
After saving all the layers as numbered PNGs, I imported them into Adobe Premiere as a PNG sequence. It’s important to double-check that all the files are correctly labeled, otherwise the sequence won’t import.
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Once I imported the PNG sequence and dragged it into the timeline, I adjusted the timing so that the loop didn’t go so fast.
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After that, I could export my animation either as a video or GIF in Export Settings.
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Conclusion
Viola! My very own spinning astronaut walk cycle. If I were to do this again, I wouldn’t go as crazy with the stylistic variety since this animation is a bit straining on the eyes. Still, it was a fun exercise in combining some 3D knowledge with Photoshop to create an interesting rotoscoped end result.
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