The cycle madness continues this week with another common form of locomotion; Jumping! If you take a look at last week’s run cycle, you’ll notice that there’s a brief moment during the cycle where the character is no longer in contact with the ground. Unlike the walk cycle, where there’s usually at least one foot planted on the ground at all times, a run is likely to have a frame or two where the character is completely airborne. We’re talking about “controlled falls” after all! Well now it’s time to add some intention to that idea, and have the character launch upward with no other purpose than to jump. Here’s what I came up with:

Nothing fancy here, but it gets the idea across! Despite being a vastly different kind of motion, you’ll notice that the main poses of this animation function in the same way they do in my head take animation. Much like in that motion, here there’s an anticipation pose, an exaggerated pose, and a settle pose. I also added a good amount of squash and stretch (another one of the 12 principles of animation) to this to give the character a sense of weight and elasticity. These basic principles apply to so many different kinds of animated movement, and it’s one of the unexpectedly enjoyable things about learning animation. By learning how to create something like a character head take, I somewhat unknowingly learned several skills that I can then apply to an animation that is drastically different. And that’s what happened here. I’m sure many of the techniques I’ve learned by creating this jump will undoubtedly apply to future animations that have nothing to do with jumping at all!

Kayla Classic Rig by fRigging Awesome Studios

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