Hello everyone,
I’m Yakier, the animator who’s working on “The Splitting: Chapter 3” for the past couple months.
Recently I’ve been working on a new animation for the adorable cat who lives at the asylum.
The original running loop is cute and minimalistic, it fits well with the rest of the motion in chapter 2 –
However, as the cat is tasked with additional roles in the upcoming chapter, his animation needed to be more lively and dynamic. I turned it into this –
This is the final result –
After studying references (basically watching cat videos for a while), I realised the original sprite had done most of the work – the leg motion already matched that of a real cat on the run.
The main thing I had to do was to add weight – make it seem like the cat is pushing himself up and forward with each step. I achieved it by simply taking each frame and splitting the picture into 2 segments, then shifting their position a pixel or two at the time, to match the motion the legs dictated.
I treated the head as a segment of its own and used it to enhance the natural wave motion that cats are creating in their run. Technically speaking, The head is the first segment to rise (by a single pixel) when the hind legs kick, this creates an offset in the animation that leads the entire wave motion.
The tail was actually the only thing drawn from scratch. It was drawn by hand at the end of the process – being a reaction to the body’s motion, a very essential flair in animation.
Still only 5 frames long, a few minor adjustments can breath a few extra lives into the cat.
When the cat runs upwards and downwards is where things get trickier, but that may be the subject to another post.
Thank you all for reading!
Yakier
