Kai's Walk Cycle

Making a detailed character , i knew i would encounter some problems but being stubborn as i'am
I was determined to find a way to keep him true to the character sheet.
I knew one problem was keeping all that detail of his muscles etc natural whilst kai walked.
2. How he would walk as he had fin like feet and his legs were like hind quarters so the walk itself would be difficult even though kai is bi-pedal.

The teacher suggested to me to look for reference of a creature that was similar and take screen shots of the frames and then trace those outlines as a guide for kai's walk cycle.

Problems i encountered: When capturing the frames i captured were too few and the poses between each frame, it was such a big gap between each other that i couldn't really use them.
On the up side it was a good idea to base my walk cycle on.

Here are the frames i took that i was to use as my walk guide from Youtube;










You get the idea


In flash i used this as my background to help me with my walk cycle
Image from Animator's Survival Kit by Kit Richardson...i think thats the name.

The background i already had a strong idea of what i wanted. I wanted him to be in a ruined/destroyed city as in Kai's profile states. I'm drawn to night scenes so i wanted it to be that time .... i don't know why i feel nostalgic when night falls so i'm sure Kai feels that way too :p

Here is the progression of my background;


The night bg is a gradient, and drew the moon aswell as using gradients both done in Flash.


The ruined city is meant to be ground zero of a destroyed Sydney, which i did in Illustrator and imported it into Flash.



To make the walk i started to use the bone tool and break Kai into individual parts as use him as my rough walking guide and then i would re-draw each frame individually (drawing 48+ frames is insane :|...). I wanted it to be natural but in the end it looked like he was sneaking, but i find it rather befitting because he is walking through a war zone... so he should "sneak" past the dangers of ground zero

Here is a screenshot of how i was using the bone tool;



After many long hours and my left hand cramping up and becoming numb because of drawing each individual frame... here is Kai's walk cycle, it may not be perfect but i love it that he is 'sneak walking' :) its hard not to grow attached it after putting in so much work/pain