http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/biker.html (18 MB)
More woodcut animation. I found this nice cut of a double bike and separated and rigged it:
As you see the leg bones start from the pedals up. It was easier this way than the other way, and the black trousers hide any incorrectly placed thighs. (Have to overwork the knees, though.) Everything is connected via layer binding.
I kept the wheels in a separate bone layer because they have their own different speed. Still it was placing keys on every frame for the actual pedaling. You'll notice it's not really "round" - that's on purpose, but I think I will rework that, too, and make it a bit jerkier because it fits the style better. Overall I want to maintain a certain stiffness to the characters.
As you see some images are used multiple times. I found an annoying behaviour of AS here: if I change the source image, I have to re-import each and every instance of it (via the "source..." tab), otherwise AS will still render the old version. I'd like this to be improved, maybe with an optional dialogue asking wether I want to replace all or just this instance.
Also I'd like to work with smaller preview images which could reduce rendering time drastically. My ideal setup for this would be a table listing each and every image of a project, with three columns, one for the layer name, one for the preview file name, and one for the hi-res file name. AFAIK not even AfterFX has an asset management like this.
Rendering of such a project takes clearly longer than your usual vector stuff. I think I'll be faster if I render a loop of the bikers first as a QT file, then import this and do the ride over the hills. This is the same as the concept of "nested projects" or "pre-rendered compositions" in AfterFX.
Doing a ride over an irregular path like this is easy if you set the point of origin of the biker bone layer to one of the wheels' contact point to the ground (I chose the back one). I made the wheel go round once in 48 frames, so I placed a key every 48 frames for the layer translation (1). I found the distance easily: by just measuring the wheel's diameter on the screen and multiply it with pi. (Yes, I use a real life ruler on my screen.) Then I adjusted all those positions vertically, and inserted more keys where necessary. In a second round I adjusted the layer's rotation (3) at each of those keys so booth wheels had contact to the ground all the time.