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Topic: How to animate short legs?

I have this little, short animation I want to do, but the fact that short/mini legs don't move is really frustrating and causing me a lot of problems. I tried doing a walk cycle and a jump. Some of it's okay, some of it's a bit off, and the jump was especially difficult because without any leg-bending capacity, the dwarf can't easily tilt up.

Basically, can anyone do a tutorial on how to animate short legs properly, or point me in the direction of a good tutorial? I'm pretty sure that I'm doing something very wrong - having dwarves bob up and down to walk feels all wrong.

Last edited by jampot (July 7, 2013 (12:24pm))

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Re: How to animate short legs?

I've had some trouble with this as well, but I figured out something that works for a hopping walk:
Frame 1-back straight
2-back tilted forward
3-feet resting on top of studs
4-back tilted back
(back to 1)

Yours was similar to this, but it had more of a pause between each hop. A continuous hopping cycle looks better.
If it looks too fast, you can always add some frames during the arc part of the hop (NOT on the grounded parts).

If you don't like the hopping, you can try swiveling the dwarf back and forth, like in this brickfilm by Squid (skip to 0:39 for the walk).

As for the jumping, having the dwarf tilt down a bit before jumping, anticipating his movement up, will improve it.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Thank you!

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Maybe Lego small legs might be useful?

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Yeesh, they're way too expensive for what they are. Plus, I don't want to keep shelling out money that I don't have on stuff like this. Thanks anyway.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

In The Lost Invention I had a bunch of short people.

I only needed them to walk a few times, so I just made them do a little hop step.  I tried to avoid walking as much as possible, though, by having cartoony slides or making them move off camera.

I usually try to avoid any prolonged walk cycle if I can.  They take up loads of time and look a little repetitive.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Well, I always got angry when trying to animate with short legs, and then I found brickfortress, they have pose-able mini legs of much higher quality than the ones jahnocli showed you, and they are only half the price. I got some and found that I can animate with them almost as well as normal legs, so if you intend to do movies with short legs these are definitely a good buy.

Hope this helps you out. mini/wink

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Re: How to animate short legs?

I really don't want to be buying new pieces for this, especially when they're $1.15 each. That just seems extortionate to me.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

True, shelling out money is really hard to do.
So Squids idea is probably the best way to animate short people since you don't want to buy movable mini legs.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

GEF wrote:

Well, I always got angry when trying to animate with short legs, and then I found brickfortress, they have pose-able mini legs of much higher quality than the ones jahnocli showed you, and they are only half the price. I got some and found that I can animate with them almost as well as normal legs, so if you intend to do movies with short legs these are definitely a good buy.

Hope this helps you out. mini/wink

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Re: How to animate short legs?

jampot wrote:

I really don't want to be buying new pieces for this, especially when they're $1.15 each. That just seems extortionate to me.

They're definitely more expensive than something LEGO would offer, but keep in mind you're buying custom-made accessories made in small batches by a hobbyist. It might be pricey, but it's not really extortionate.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Squid wrote:

In The Lost Invention I had a bunch of short people.

I only needed them to walk a few times, so I just made them do a little hop step.  I tried to avoid walking as much as possible, though, by having cartoony slides or making them move off camera.

I usually try to avoid any prolonged walk cycle if I can.  They take up loads of time and look a little repetitive.

I agree with squid, Its a trial and error thing and I would suggest just doing a test or two with a few steps for a few different types of walking and pick which you find is best. its better to explore the entire idea of it and try different things so you can find out what you can work with best.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Wow, wrong thread.

Yeah, totally meant to do that. mini/shifty

Last edited by Chris W. (July 9, 2013 (08:35am))

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Uh, I think this might be the wrong thread.... mini/tongue

Nice-looking set, though.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

I animated a girl with short legs, but she was an exaggerated super-hyper characters, so I just made her jump up and down constantly, using clear elements when she was in the air.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Jargon wrote:

They're definitely more expensive than something LEGO would offer, but keep in mind you're buying custom-made accessories made in small batches by a hobbyist. It might be pricey, but it's not really extortionate.

I've just bought five of them, and I *definitely* couldn't have done that if they were extortionate...

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Re: How to animate short legs?

jampot wrote:

I really don't want to be buying new pieces for this, especially when they're $1.15 each. That just seems extortionate to me.

> $1.15
> Extortionate

mini/confused

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Sean wrote:
jampot wrote:

I really don't want to be buying new pieces for this, especially when they're $1.15 each. That just seems extortionate to me.

> $1.15
> Extortionate

mini/confused

$1.15 extortionate? You need to get out more...

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Methinks you misunderstand my post, jahnocli. The " mini/confused  " smiley I used was placed with the intention of conveying my incredulous reaction to jampot's opinion of $1.15 being extortionate. Not sure what "getting out more" has to do with monetary issues one way or another.

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Re: How to animate short legs?

Sean wrote:

Methinks you misunderstand my post, jahnocli. The " mini/confused  " smiley I used was placed with the intention of conveying my incredulous reaction to jampot's opinion of $1.15 being extortionate. Not sure what "getting out more" has to do with monetary issues one way or another.

Ah! Duly noted. Sorry about the misunderstanding...