A walk anim for this bird worm guy!

I roughed out the pelvis chest and skull each on their own layer so I can move them around independently- these won’t squash much, the squishing is mostly in the connecting tissue. I did the arms/legs/tail in the simplest possible form (a line) so its really quick and easy to redraw poses. Also with their own layer.
 

I got the primary movement roughed out first in the lowest number of frames I thought I could get away with- this is 5 frames. Usually I’ll start with 6 for a walk, but I wanted this to be more monstery, almost like a limp, so the left leg has 3 frames bur right leg has only 2 to break the symmetry. This is why his body squishes down for one step then up for the other instead of having an up and a down for each step like in a regular walk.
 

Doodled some frames for the legs.
 

Refined the head/body movement a little.
 

A wave motion for the tail… I don’t know why floppy stuff like that is so fun!
 

Starting on an arm- trying to figure out how floppy/rigid it should be in which areas… I wanted a balance like he was swinging his arm with muscles inside it, not just dragging a dead floppy rubber limb, but I still wanted some flop… really helps to have it represented as a simple line here so I redraw and playback a whole lot of variations really quick and never have to worry about how nicely I’ve drawn it or fuss over details or messy pixels.
 

Putting a little wriggle in the other arm… You can see I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it yet, I didn’t want it to swing behind his body and be obstructed for most of the frames.
 

I moved the second arm and offset the movement by a frame or two until I was basically happy with it, then decided the overall movement wasn’t going to get figured out any more precisely until I had some accurate art in there. I don’t like to go too far with just a stick representation; you can have a nasty surprise when you start putting in the art. In fact here you can see his body looks kind of elongated now I’ve drawn it in, but that wasn’t coming through with just the circles.

I guess this is missing a step here- generally I just do flat color blobs first to get the silhouette shapes right before adding details, but I was just overenthusiastic to draw his little beak and stuff!
 

I drew in the arms, refined their flopping/wriggling a bit more, and squished his body a bit to get rid of the “elongated” look.
 

When I was happy with the movement, I stretched out the timing and drew in two inbetween frames to pad it out in the slow parts, making it a 7 frame anim. I like to save any extra frames til the end, so I’m not deleting and redoing them whenever I change my mind about the timing.

Also did a final pass on small details like his turkey neck dealy, and added a motionblur smear frame for his face when it drops down quickly.

Now he’s ready to go in the game and walk about like an idiot!

-Barney