Walk Cycle

Copy and paste from http://www.skaarj.com/gimpystick/faileas/440

The Actual Walk Cycle

Emotion is king, remember. Every walk will have a mood to it, even a generic walk. But for the purposes of explaining the walk itself, I'm going to be generic. Try to remember and include all this in your walks, but don't freak out if you forget or miss anything. This is a lot to swallow at once, but after you do a few it becomes natural.

Contact Position

A good place to start a walk cycle is from the contact position. In this pose, the forward foot has the heel contacting the ground, and the rear foot is bend and partially raised off the ground.

One step, from contact position to contact position, can be 9 frames. Depending on the walk you do it can be more or less, but play with nine frames as default so you can get a feel for how things work. Best to keep as many variables as possible clean when learning, so if something goes wrong you know what's likely not the problem.

Example of Contact Position and Key Frame 1 and 9:

The easiest way to do key frame 9 is to basically trace key frame 1, but reverse which sides the arms and legs are coming out of. The rear limbs will be slightly smaller/shorter. Also notice the value on them. This helps the viewer easily tell what's rear and forward.

And notice that the front and rear feet are on two seperate planes, with the rear feet more towards the back. The fifth goal of drawing for animation is Make it 3D, and perspective like this (and the rear limbs being smaller, and the value on the rear limbs) all contribute to that.

Lastly, the arms are opposite the legs. This is a balance issue. If you ever are curious about how something would work, try it yourself and see how you behave. My animation teacher Tony White, who's been animating for some 30 plus years and has his own studio, still gets up when he's doing an animation and tests how different walks would work.

Figure-4 Passing Position

The major breakdown for a walk is the passing position, when the planted leg is at its top height (straight up and down) and the other leg is being pulled past. This results in a "figure 4" appearance.

Example of Figure-4 Passing Position:

Walking in Place

Usually when people are teaching walks, they say not to start by making the figure walk in place, as that's a bit harder than just matching up the feet every time with the last frame, as they don't slide.

When walking in place, it's important that the feet are always moving back at the same rate. With the frames we have now, 1, 5, and 9, we have our three major positions for the feet (forward, middle, back). As long as we make sure the feet slide back equally each frame, things will work out fine.

To do that, when inbetweening, have the frames in question, such as 1 and 5, and measure where the back of the foot is in each, even just visually, and make a mark between the back of frame 1's foot, and the back of frame 5's foot. That's the back of the foot for frame 3. You can do the same for frame 7, and the frames between 1 and 3, 3 and 5, and etc.

The body stays mostly the same and moves up and down. And the feet will always be moving back except when it's lifted to pass.

Movement of Hips and Shoulders

This is a slightly more complicated aspect of a walking. But it really, really helps the walk look good.

Think of the hip and shoulders as a cylinder. When a leg moves forward, it pulls that side of the cylinder forward, and the other side moves back.

An example of hip and shoulder movement in a walk:

The basic thing to remember is that the attachment point of the leg moves forward when the leg is reaching forward. If you can get that, it will help your walk more than the up/down movement. In fact, I screwed up on the up/down movement in the example, and I can't figure out how I broke it. I don't have the time or energy to go look it up. If it matters enough to you, remind me to find it later.

Balance

There's two frames that will need adjusting.

There's a "kick" frame just before the contact, where the forward leg goes even further forward so it can come back in the contact frame.

Between contact and figure-4, the inbeween should keep the rear toe on the ground so the figure isn't unbalanced.

The figure should always be balanced or tilting forward. If a still frame makes him look like he's tilting back, then you'll need to adjust something. Make a foot continue contacting, or move the body forward, or whatever.

Secondary Action/Overlap of the Hands

Secondary Action and Overlapping action are on the 12 principles. On a generic character, the hands can preform this secondary action. The arms are swinging, right? Well, how about the hands don't quite catch up, so even though the arms start moving down, the hands bend backwards against the flow? Overlapping action is important in animation, because it prevents things from looking stiff and mechanical.

Example of hands dragging:

Headbob

The head isn't static. It moves around. Unfortunately, I'm too tired to dig up my notes on how Jazno said the basic movements are, but I do know looking at the ground when doing the contact position is one of them.

Second Verse, Same as the First

To get a full cycle you'll need the contact positions to switch again. Which means you'll need to go from 1-9 to 9-15. (16 will be frame 1 for a loop). You can copy the figure four passing position as a mirror, but it's probably best to inbetween the rest so things don't get off too far.

You can also leave it on 2s, or "shoot a test" on 2s before finalizing it to make sure everything works right.

This has a lot of problems. The hands don't do the secondary action, the volumes and limb lengths keep changing, and other stuff. But it's there to illustrate that my method actually works if you take your time on it, and don't use a medium you're not familiar with it. (I did it all on a tablet. I'm used to paper.)