Noah's Ark Zoo Farm
To begin researching and analysing the movement of quadrupeds, we went to Noah's Ark Zoo Farm, where I was able to take lots of photos and video footage of quadrupeds moving, capturing their walk cycles. This was a very god beginning to this part of the brief because it has now given me a lot of reference material to work from. Below is a collection of the videos that I took and edited, slowing them down in order to analyse and understand the movements better.
GoatsThis video is very goo to look at for a simple, profile walk cycle, clearly showing all the legs and showing an entire, full cycle.
Highland CowsThese are some good videos of profile walk cycles of Highland Cows. These will be very good to use when trying to analyse the movements because the videos are clear and the framing is good. There is also a video at the end which is good to compare to the others because it's one of the cows running, showing that at a point, the cow has all four legs off the ground and almost appears to be jumping.
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Zebra, Llama & GiraffeAs this includes three different animals, it's interesting to start to compare the walk cycles of these very different animals and to also see the similarities between them.
TortoiseThis is quite a long video of a tortoise walking which is very intersting to compare to the walk cycles of the other animals because it's very different.
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Video Stills
Here are some stills taken from the videos again, to be able to see the movements in order and analyse them much easier.
Research
This is an image from the website below which helps to understand what order the feet touch the ground in different movement cycles. This will help a lot when thinking about creating my own quadruped walk cycle.
http://www.rocket5studios.com/tutorials/approaches-to-animating-quadrupeds-the-walk-cycles/
Here is a similar diagram that shows when each foot is off of the ground. By looking at the diagram, you can see that when a foot lifts, the one that lifted before hasn't get gone back on the ground. This means at times, there are only two legs on the ground.
Drawn Stills
Here are the drawings that I made from the video and stills of the llama walk cycle. This was really useful to do after the research as it helped me to visualise the footfall patterns better.
Llama Walk Cycle
After drawing over the sequence of images of a llama walking, I've imported them into Photoshop to experiment with them and be able to analyse certain aspects such as the amount the head moves.
Sequence
Here are a sequence of images that I created by drawing over some of the stills from the Llama walk cycle. This allowed me to get a more accurate depiction of each frame so you can see more precisely how each leg moves and the order at which they move and follow the typical walk cycle footfall pattern.
Creating these images on Photoshop has then allowed me to experiment with each one more to try and find out some other details of the walk cycle. |
Overlay
This image is a combination of all the separate images above. The aim of this was to see how much the head moves during the walk. Although the diagram initially appears confusing and very busy, it does show that the head only moves slightly during the walk cycle.
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Overlay Sequence
This is an alternative approach, putting the images in a line to try and show the progression and create the sense of movement. However, like the previous overlapped image, it's unclear and confusing as all the legs overlap each other becoming jet a bunch of lines.
Tortoise
As a comparison to the llama, I decided to study the tortoise walk cycle to see if the footfall pattern was the same even though they are very different animals. After studying the video and stills, I found out that they do have the same footfall patterns but the tortoises is much slower with smaller steps than the llama.
Goat
I then wanted to analyse a quadruped in more detail and so chose to study the goat because the video footage that I had of the walk cycle was very clear and a goat is a very simple quadruped in terms of structure.
Basic Structure
As I wanted to create much more accurate stills that are all of equal proportions, I simplified the image of the goat so it would be easier to draw out each frame accurately. The model includes the shape of the head, placement of shoulders and pelvis and legs.
Video of Walk Cycle
Here is a video that I put together by using the drawn stills above. It's very rough as the images aren't all quite in the right place and these drawings aren't too accurate, but it shows a quick example of the pattern of the legs during a quadruped walk cycle. The frame rate is also too fast I think, however I was very limited with software and could only change the speed by certain amounts, so this is the best out of the speeds that I could choose from.