Ghost Uni – Walk Attempt (..sort of)

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So yesterday, I very quickly sketched a unicorn.

unicorn-ghost

Hmm…not too bad for a whole minute (or less) of drawing. Hmmm…maybe I can redraw this over and over!

So I had the brilliant idea to do an animation of a ghost unicorn (and maybe adventures with the unicorn). Since everything would be in painty-sketches and either ghostly or silhouetted it would be easier to do.

Like all things, that turned a bit more difficult than what I thought.

I copied a walk pattern reference (what’s great about animating horses and horse-like creatures is that there are soooo many resources on gaits! The bad part? It’s hard and any horse person can see what’s wrong with it so fast….not me but others….).

At first, it even seemed to go backward. So I swapped some frames around and it seemed to be better but highly asymmetrical. So I redo a bit. It’s still a bit asymmetrical (and the back legs look all over the place! Ugh!)…..I need to work more on movement, make it smoother and then clean it up slightly (it doesn’t need to be cleaned up that much for this animation). Perhaps the frame rate is a bit fast for this number of frames (8) and at this slow gait too (also maybe the mane and tail need less movement)….

uniwalk_sorta

All injustices to the laws of physics, locomotion and proper equine movement are due to the inherent supernaturalism of the unicorn which is also ghost like 😉

The nice thing about a ghost uni, is that you can always have it just float around….that would be WAY easier to animate. Hello keyframes!

PS: The trot is way easier to animate than the walk. I have not been successful with the canter yet though.

I can only freeform sketch many things left. I have no idea why but that’s what “flip horizontal” will be for 😉   Maybe I should be doing this in flash but I don’t really like the flash look…I prefer this sketchy/painted look. Am I stupid to be animating in Photoshop? (Photoshop CS3 which is old…but the last time I played with animation, it was in ImageReady!) Maybe…but like I said, I don’t like drawing in Flash at the moment (maybe it’s just me and vectors that need to get along…since I never use illustrator either…).

It’s true. I guess you really can shoehorn Photoshop to do nearly anything….

Once I get my animation sequences down, I will bring them into Flash and/or After Effects I think….maybe I’ll look into proper (non vector) 2D animation software….but unless it’s going to magically create in-betweens or shade/colour for me…I’m not sure if it’ll be anymore useful than Photoshop…..