Flash Animation Walk Cycle

For this assignment, we were given the task of creating a walk cycle with our own character, and having them walk across the screen realistically, while objects passed by. 

After much deliberation, I felt that it was in my best interest to be horribly torturous to myself, and choose eight legs, instead of two.  While I still wanted to give it that human aspect, I merged the torso and upwards of a human, with the body of a spider, much like a centaur.

As I am fond of character creation, I first sketched out a very rough design of what I wanted the character to look like.

As it would be much too taxing to do a realistic animation, I chose to "cartoonize" my character into a more simplistic design.  Merging the aspects of a spider and a person into a decent balance, after doing a good bit of sketching and studying of basic spider anatomy.

 

 After a brutal scouring for the animation of a spider walking directly sideways, I found a video of an animation done in 3D.  To aid in my creation, I took frames of the animation, tracing over them with my own character.

I sketched out the image of my character entirely in Illustrator, and did this frame by frame, to get the greatest possible accuracy, and cleanliness in imagery.  Unfortunately, in my rush, I made things a bit overly complicated for myself by not creating as many moveable paths as I had ought to.  Though I managed.

I realized also that her hands looks like mittens.  Felt I should clear up that they're pedipalps...

I did a good bit of editing to check the animation of the frames before importing the file into flash.  I made a few more edits after this stage, as the torso was originally very static compared to the rest of the body, and her pedipalp was doing a nice train imitation.

I finally imported the file into Flash, by exporting each layer as a .swf frame.  I made a few more edits to the arm and the breasts at this point, before realizing I should probably start working on the actual animation.

I deliberated a bit on the setting, before deciding it was in good interest to choose a cave scene.  I used images of a cave, and of dirt, and filtered them in Illustrator, cutting them and importing them to create layers of movement, and direction.

The dark box around my character is an alpha lowered solid colour, for the sake of creating an ambient haze.

I added images that would pass by Eydra as she walked, as well as a zoom effect to create an interesting loop effect for the animation.  To finalize it, I added a bout of music (Cold Fever - Moshimoss) to create a chilling ambiance for the scene.

After finishing, I published the works as a .swf and .html, and uploaded them to the server of my website.  

The finished product in located in the link below:

http://www.chromacube.net/DMA205/DMA205DB_McConnell_Robin_FBF2.html