ALAN BECKER - Animating Walk Cycles

so let's talk about walk cycles a walk cycle is a looping animation of a walking character which starts with the first foot goes to the second foot and ends back on the first foot we're going to cover run cycles in the next video since there is just so much to cover with just walk cycles so walk cycles can be scary for beginning animators because it seems like there are so many poses to memorize but if you break it down into simpler components it becomes much easier to wrap your head around so instead of thinking of a walk cycle as 12 different poses to memorize think of it as two poses the first pose is called the contact pose because it is where the foot contacts the ground the second pose is called the passing pose because it is where the other foot directly passes the first foot to complete the cycle we need to repeat these two poses and reverse them in order to let both feet take a step so just from these four drawings we already feel like the characters walking we could call this done but in order to make the walk cycle more realistic there are two more poses that we should add called the up and down poses these are where the head is highest and where its lowest in the cycle the down pose happens right after the contact pose and the up pose happens after the passing pose if we didn't add these poses the walk would look very flat with no balance at all so if you're just starting out it's okay to just use two poses but know that ultimately there are four poses that go into each step of a walk cycle when making a character walk across a screen some people will make the walk cycle first and move the cycle across the screen while this will save you some work it can sometimes look mechanical and slidy like a video game character a better solution is to hold the cycle in place and have the background move instead otherwise you would animate the whole sequence from start to finish this gives you the most control it's important to map out where you want each step to take place and space them out evenly both on the stage as well as on a timeline drawing someone walking across the screen can be one of the most annoying things to animate if it's not organized well place the contact poses first add the passing poses and then fill in the up and down poses the arms can be added at the same time as the legs or they can be added afterwards to simplify and isolate each process the arms are farthest apart from each other on the down pose and closest together on the passing pose they should be opposite to the legs meaning the right arm is in front when the right leg is in back and vice-versa you can also have the arms doing whatever you want throughout the walk just put the main poses in first fill in the in-betweens when animating a walk cycle from the front the same rules apply except the two poses you want to draw first are now the up and down poses because these are more clearly distinguishable from the front compared to the passing and contact poses personality can be added to a walk cycle by adjusting a few factors these factors include timing position and offset to give our character a sad depressed walk let's hunt him forward make his contact pose and down pose take much longer and droop his arms down low his up and down poses should be close in height to take away the balance to give our character a happy proud walk let's lean his body back and change the timing to emphasize his contact pose and bring his arms way up then let's offset his arm movement so that there are two frames ahead of the legs in order to make it seem like he's leading with his arms giving him a more powerful attitude in order to make him look relaxed we just need to offset the arms in the other direction and make them lag behind the rest of the body by two frames last let's lean him forward now he looks pretty chill so that's all I've got for walk cycles but before we end I wanted to announce my new patreon page patreon.com/lenguin

Channel: AlanBeckerTutorials

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Id: 2y6aVz0Acx0

Length: 3min 53sec (233 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2015