Animate your first walk cycle in Blender (FREE Rig included)

let's animate your very first walk cycle in blender what I'm about to show you is the complete 1eh hour lecture from the beginner section of our ultimate animation course this lesson will be recorded by Simona not me she's the co-founder of two anime Academy and she most recently worked on Marvel's Ant-Man Quantum Mania so i' be taking out my notebooks for you now before I let you jump into the lesson there's five small steps that we got to do to set up your file so that there's no hiccups while you're following along step one download blender you can head over to blender.org and make sure to download blender 4 or higher step two if you don't have the two anime bot rig already don't worry just go to to anime.con load to get the download link now that you have the rig you'll notice that there's also a zip file inside this is to animates UI add-on which is something we've developed for blender 4 and above you only need to install this once by by going to edit preferences add-ons install and once you locate the add-on just click on it and install add-on it will then appear right here which then you can check mark it and for the future you can check for updates every once in a while to make sure that it's up to date so you never have to install this again you just do it once and it will work with any two animate rig it'll automatically give you access to a ton of options right here on the side panel allowing you to hide and unhide controllers gives you access to special properties like the light brightness head follow different eye shapes blinking and the list goes on number four download the free resources for this lesson so that you can follow along and you can do that right where you downloaded the rig you just scroll a little bit further down you can see the lesson right here and all you have to do is press download Resources with the lesson you'll get our exercise file with the preset layout we use in the lesson to make sure that exercise file loads correctly open up a fresh blender head over to edit preferences save and load and make sure that load UI is checked you want to make sure this is checked because this tells blender to use the UI of the file that you're opening instead of your own UI in this case you want the UI of our exercise file so you leave this as checked as part of the free resources you'll also be getting a handy PDF guide that highlights all the key points talked about in the lesson this is something we give to all of our animation students under every video Lesson and lastly number five let's append the two anime bot rig into the exercise file so you can start the lesson go to file append locate the rig I'm going to go ahead and open it up go to collection and click to animate robot append and here we go if your robot shows up without any textures just go up here and change color to texture and there you go now you can click the rig go into pose mode and follow along with the lesson so just to quickly recap all we've done is we've downloaded the free to anime bot rig we've installed the rig UI add-on downloaded the free resources on the website and have appended our rig into the exercise file and with that I'll hand it over to Simona best of luck hi guys in today's lesson we're going to do our first ever walk cycle and if you want to be an animator this is something you have to be able to do in your sleep so we're going to make sure to start simple and work our way up slowly in complexity now there are two ways to approach animating a walk first is your typical walk across the screen where the character moves forward with every step which is the more proper way of doing it from my experience you'll almost always be required to do this type of walk in an animated production but the second way is a treadmill walk and that's where a character is walking in place and the feet slide back and forth in a looping action this is something you can use in like a game animation or just to practice animating different walks quicker so that's what we'll do today in future lessons we'll also explore doing different personality walks with the character actually moving across the screen so don't worry you will learn to do those too but today we'll just do a basic vanilla walk on a treadmill which which is a great way to learn the mechanics we'll be focusing on the main four poses involved in any bipad walk and those are the contact pose the down the passing position and the up position here we have a really handy image guide which comes from the famous book called The animator survival kit if you're looking into getting any additional animation resources we really recommend getting this book and let's also look at a real life walk cycle reference and try to identify these poses so here's our walk cycle reference video obviously it's slowed down to like maybe half speed but that doesn't matter so let's pause it and scrap through it to see if we can find those poses I would say somewhere around here where the front heel touches the ground this would be the contact position both feet are at the same distance from the center of gravity which is the midsection of the body and the front heel is off the ground and the back heel is off the ground as well so we're not really going to be animating arms today but you can see that in a real walk cycle the arms and the legs are reversed so here the right leg is in the back but the right arm is in the front and vice versa now moving on after the stride somewhere around here we have the down position so you can see his midsection was higher here now it drops and the knee bends and now the full foot is on the ground so instead of just the heel it's the full foot and the other foot is leaving the ground and then we continue and around here we can see the passing position so the character will be standing on just one leg their full weight is on that one leg you can see it on this right side as well and the other leg is just passing to the front to catch his weight and somewhere around here we have the up position and keep in mind that in a real human walk these poses are not as exaggerated as in our example here where the character is full on his tippy toes really high up the foot is really high and dragging behind with the toes in real life it will be a lot more subtle but we're doing animation so we're going to be trying to push the poses to be more cartoony and interesting but anyways you can see the foot is slowly lifting off the ground in the back and his center of gravity is going up as well and the foot is swinging forward the heel is getting ready to hit the ground around here we have the other stri position so the legs have reversed now obviously the right leg was in the back before now it's in the front the right arm is in the back now and he's ready to take the next step where you can see it reversing again so this is how much we're going to be doing today we're going to start with one stride then the second stride and then back to the first stride once the same leg hits the ground again we're just going to Loop the animation and it's going to look like he's walking forward another thing to notice if we're going to be looking at this right hand image is that whenever his weight is on one leg the whole body shifts to that side right because if the body continued having all of its weight in the center he would basically fall over right now so just watch as I scrub the weight goes to the right now the weight goes to the left to the right again to the left so up and down and left and right that's basically the main motion of the midsection of the body okay okay so let's talk about timing now there are two different types of timing that I generally use there's the standard 25 frame walk which is more brisk and energetic and it makes the character look like they're walking with a purpose I personally like keeping my numbers even so I marked the first pose on frame zero and from frame zero to frame 12 it's a total of 13 frames per step and then the second half is also 13 frames because this middle stri pose is in included on both sides so 0 to 12 is 13 frames and then 12 to 24 is also 13 frames if we include this pose in it and this is actually the type of walk we'll be animating today the second type is what I call a casual stroll and in this walk the character walks a lot slower they are not in a rush to get anywhere just enjoying their day and this one will be 17 frames per step so from frame zero to frame 32 or if you like to start from frame one it would be frame 1 to frame 33 and we included the timing guide for both types of walk in the PDF so feel free to refer to it as needed okay so now we're ready to start animating I set up this file for you so we can see our character from the 3/4 view which is our camera view right here and then we see the side view and then we have our perspective view which we'll also be using as our front view if you click on this minus y button right here and when you're animating a walk all of these angles are actually really important so otherwise the walk is not really going to look good so like I said I like starting on frame zero so that my numbers are even but if you want you can start on frame one and then just shift everything by one frame so of course I'm going to select the whole character in pose mode and I'm going to press I to get a key on my first frame or my frame zero and we have this handy guide for our walk cycle timing today I added it because there's going to be a lot of copy and pasting poses from one side to the other and it always takes me a second or so to figure out like oh the passing position on one side is on frame six and then on the other side it's frame 18 so it's just easier to look at this guide and not have to think about it especially when you're starting out okay so as we know our first pose is going to be the stride pose which is the contact pose it's the same thing just different names for it and this is kind of the shape of the pose so what we need to do is grab one foot and push it forward forward and then we're also going to rotate this controller here to lift the toes off the ground and you can see the leg is being very overextended here and kind of stretching when the toes are on the ground but it gets a lot better when the toes are off the ground and of course continue looking at the side view as well especially for this type of pose and make sure that the angle of the foot looks nice also for this stri pose or the contact pose feel free to grab the Torso controller and just bring it slightly lower than the default just so you can push the stride to be a little bit wider and then we also need to push the right foot backwards now if I just eyeball it it's not going to look that great once I Loop it it's going to feel like the character limps and one step is always shorter than the other and for this basic vanilla walk I just want them to be equal and the way to do that is very easy actually I'm going to go to my first foot press n and under item I have this location transform and I know that I'm doing the Y AIS here which is the green one and this is the value that I'm getting so I'm going to grab the value press contrl + C click on the other foot I'm going to paste the value and instead of making a negative I'm going to just delete the minus to make it positive and the foot is going to be exactly the same distance from the center line of the body as the left foot and this is because we're exactly where the X and and the y axis meet so it works well for us and now I'm going to bring the heel up on this pose as well and one more thing when you're animating strides is you want to be rotating the hips as well because the left foot is more in the front and the right foot is in the back you want the hips to follow that a little bit now if you're animating a typical feminine walk you will have more rotation on the hips and if you want to do something more masculine or something more neutral you just want to do it a little bit so you don't want to go too crazy with it and I'm just going to do this much if you want you can bring the Torso controller just slightly lower because you don't want the knes to be overextending and stretching because that causes Pops in the animation so just have them like either just very neutral or just slightly bent for now and we'll be adjusting that a little bit later but this is what looks good to me so the legs will always be affecting the hips and you have to animate them together and think about them together as one unit now we know that the second stride will be happening on frame 12 and then on frame 24 we will have the same exact POS as we have now so what I can do is grab the whole character and I already have a key here on frame zero so I'm going to contrl C or you can shift d to duplicate drag that same key onto frame 24 and now we can actually also shorten our timeline to just 24 frames because we don't need any of those frames that come after and like I said there's going to be a lot of mirror pasting on this walk or any walk that you're going to be animating so I can also contrl C that first pose and then on frame 12 I know there's a second stride and I can do control shift and V so now my pose has flipped and now the character's feed are shifting from one pose to the next if I play you'll see it so this is the base for our walk cycle and everything else is going to be happening within this time range and we haven't really talked about this much yet but instead of Anima in splines which means we have these nice curves that the computer is creating for us wherever we don't have keys we're actually going to be working in steps so that means I'm going to select all of my keys and make sure my channels are selected and also all of my keys in the graph editor and I'll press T and instead of bezier which is where we have now I'm going to change that to constant now what happens is that my key is going to be held on all of these frames and then it's going to change only when there is another key and then this one is going to be held and it's going to change again once there is another key and this is actually very helpful for a lot of different animation workflows especially when you're just starting out and trying to figure out the movement you don't want to be confused by what the computer is giving you you want to create your own poses and this makes it a lot easier to read your anim anation and then everything should already be keyed on frame 24 but I'm still going to make sure it is and what we can do at this point if we want to is create a loop so we've done this before just hovering over the graph editor with still every single key selected I'm going to press shift e and make Cy click and you know you don't really need to do this because our animation is going to be just 24 frames and it's always going to go back to the first frame but if you want to continue scrubbing after the first pose like we did before for in some other animations then maybe having it on a cyclic modifier is going to help you and now of course because our animation is 24 frames we just want to shorten the timeline to 23 frames now our file is nicely prepped we have our kind of anchor poses on our first and the last frame and we have our Loop we've also figured out the base for our stride poses on both feet and eventually we're also going to add the animation on the head and on all these accessories like the antennas and the lights and also these little arms but we're going to keep that for after we figured out our torso hips and our legs because those are the most important parts of any walk cycle and especially on a character like this that basically doesn't really have arms we want to focus on this lower part okay so after the contact or the stride pose the next thing you want to do is what's exactly between them and that's the passing or the crossover position and you can see that that's this red pose here with one foot fully planted on the ground and below the body holding all of its weight and the second foot is fully off the ground and passing from the back to the front so we're going to go to frame six where our crossover position happens and the easiest thing you can do as a starting point for shaping this pose is finding the perfect Center and the way you can do that easily is again having everything selected and hovering over the viewport press shift e and then once you get this sliding bar you want to go to exactly 50% and then confirm and the pose doesn't look good right now but you know that it's the exact middle and the foot that the character is standing on is exactly below the character and this is important because the one rule of animating a character on a treadmill is that when the foot is planted on the ground it has to move in a linear fashion where it's not slowing down or speeding up at any point it's always exactly 50% between the key on the left and the key on the right and you're going to see it better once we have more keys but just try to remember that so for us right now the foot that's going to be on the ground is going to be the screen right foot if you can see that because the character is going from having the foot in the front and now normally the body would be moving forward but because we have a treadmill the foot just moves backwards and of course the character is bent down a little bit so we're just going to grab the Torso and move him up until he's pretty much straight maybe there can be slight bent in the knee so he's not overextending the knee but this looks good for now and this left foot is going to be off the ground now so let's lift it up and to rotate the heel and the foot you could either use the same controller here or you can use this heel controller and I like using that because we're also using that heel controller to lift the heel and the toes off the ground so I don't want to make my animation convoluted and hard to fix by having too many controllers doing the same thing if this controller and this controller gives me similar results I'm just going to continue using this heel ik controller because it's easier I'm going to bring it down and now because it lifts my foot off the ground quite a lot maybe I can just bring that foot controller lower and so this is what I'm getting right now the other thing we talked about is the transfer of of weight from left to right so now that the character has all of his weight on his screen right foot we have to shift the weight to the right as well and you can keep it subtle if you want to again if you were animating like a stereotypical super feminine walk with lots of hip sway you might want to move the Torso more left and right but here we're just going to keep it subtle and the next thing you want to remember is always animating the hips so right now because the feet are pretty much at the same level on the x axis the hips are not really going to have any left and right rotation so the Y is pretty much at zero but whenever one foot is holding all of the weight that's when that hip goes up that's just what happens in real life the weight of the body is pushing down because of gravity but the straight leg is holding it up so this angle happens so you always want to have that and again you can keep it subtle you don't have to go too crazy you can always make it more or you can make it less later but the thing is with walk Cycles is that everything affects everything so if you start changing things a lot later then you're going to be doing a lot of reanimation in so you want to get kind of close to what you're already thinking of having in your final but of course I'm going to be adjusting things you're going to be adjusting it's normal so don't be too stressed about it anything you do you can fix later and we want to make sure this heel controller is zeroed out completely right now there is a little bit of rotation so since the character is fully standing on his leg it's not really possible for him to be lifting his toes off the ground without like falling over or changing his center of gravity so that's good we have the feed where we we need them to be we animated the hips going up and down zeroed out the side to side motion this foot is off the ground and the toes are dragging behind so let's just leave that for now and I'm going to again grab the whole pose by pressing a I like to double check make sure that everything is keyed so I'm going to key again now I'm going to grab the pose contrl C and I can see that my passing position is also on frame 18 on the other side so I'll go to frame 18 control shift V and now I have the other pose and I'm going to get us the front view as well so already it's starting to look like a walk of course we're missing poses but you can tell what's happening even just looking at this I feel like the swing on my hips might be too much so I'm just going to correct it right now so I can just grab this hip controller and I can see that I am actually using my blue axis which is the Z axis I'm going to go here and the easiest way to do this right now is just grabbing everything and using S Y to scale down and as I'm scaling I'm looking at my character and how the angle looks then I'm going to confirm and press play again and that looks better to me I also want to make sure that my knee is not overextending and that is the up and down motion of the Torso that contributes to that so I'm going to look at the Z location and I'm gonna grab these two top poses and gy to move them up and down and I'll just bring them slightly lower and this helps me make sure I'm moving them at the same time by the same value so he's not going to be higher on one stride than the other okay so that looks better now after we have our stride and our passing position that's when we can do our down and our up position and the reason why you want to do it in this order is again the foot that's on the ground has to have always perfect in between so the timing has to be perfectly equal on one side and the other side and if you just had a stride positions and then you want it to do the down position right away it's a lot harder to figure out where that position should be but now that we have this we can move on to our frame three and do our down position so again grab everything shift e get our 50% in between and let's look at our helpful guide so on the down position the midsection is at its lowest point the front foot is fully planted and the back foot has actually left the ground and it's rotated more than it was on the contact pose and it's starting to move forward now obviously here the drawings are pushed forward normally the heel would stay in that same position so this heel would be here but then the drawings would be overlapping so it would be really hard to see so we know that this foot that's going back which is the left foot has to be planted on the ground so I'm just going to go to my X rotation and I'll make it zero and the back foot on the down position is an interesting one because the foot is indeed moving forward now but it's not going to be as far as it is right now just by doing the 50% breakdown so I'm going to grab the controller and I'm going to do shift e and bring it back to let's say 15% so it will have traveled only 15% of the distance also I want to make sure that the value on this heel controller is growing because it's peeling off the ground and it is so that works well because right now on frame zero it was 19.1 and on my frame three it's at 23.6 the actual number doesn't matter but what I'm after is making sure that the rotation is increasing because you can see the foot is actually dragging behind so so that rotation needs to be increasing from the contact posst to the down post and to the passing position and you can also see that happening on this curve here and on our dam position we want to make sure the Torso is at its lowest point which right now by just doing the perfect 50% breakdown it is not you can see it here it was low and now it's higher and then higher so I can just grab it on my curve press G+ Y and then bring it down and I'm looking at it visually in my different camera and perspective views to get what I want but I can also just manually adjust it to the position that I like again in real life the down position isn't super low but in animation we like to exaggerate it a bit and push it down lower than you would have in real life so that's what I'm going to do and the hips on these positions are actually pretty easy in terms of the wi rotation going from this side to this side it would be the perfect in between because we know that the extreme rotations are on the stri positions so on key zero and ke2 so everything else is just going to be moving between those two values so I don't have to worry about that and same goes for the up and down rotation on the z-axis so on your up and your down poses you don't really have to worry about it at the beginning later we we're going to be adjusting it a little bit now that I have figured out everything on this pose in terms of the hips and the legs and the Torso I'm going to press a again key everything just to make sure press contrl C on frame three and my next down pose is on frame 15 I'm going to go to frame 15 control shift V and let's play it so we're still missing the up position but now the walk looks already a little bit more fleshed out with the character be more bouncy so let's quickly do our opposition so we see everything working together so the process is pretty much the same again I'm going to go to frame 9 which is my up position and do shift e get my fth 50% and looking at our little guide here we know that our midsection is supposed to be at its highest point the heel is peeling off the ground and the foot is getting closer to the front position but it's still dragging behind so let's do that let's first grab our torso controller and again you can see the Z location it's going down so instead I'm just going to push it up and I'm going to help my character because now the knee is being pretty stretched I'm just going to rotate the heel up more but not going to go too extreme with it then the screen left foot which is actually the right foot and right now it looks like it's actually touching the ground already which we don't want we're going to push it back up and what you could do there's two things you could either swing the foot forward already or just drag it behind and usually you'll see for these vanilla walks you see the toes dragging behind so that's what we're going to do today and now because I'm moving the heel and it's pivoting from the toes the foot might be a little bit too high up so I just bring it down and again for this pose you don't really have to worry about the hips yet okay so that was pretty simple and straightforward okay so let's grab it contrl C and our next up position is on frame 21 let's do control shift V and play the whole thing and yeah you've got your walk cycle of course we're going to adjust things and add more motion but you can see these are the main four poses you need to have for any walk cycle no matter how how you're adjusting the poses to be more cartoony or to add personality as long as you have these five poses in it it you're going to be on the right track it's going to look like a walk cycle let's look at the front view as well so there might be a little bit too much side to side is what I'm thinking so I'm just going to grab that and that's my xax I'm going to grab everything press Sy Y and let me actually go to a frame where I can see the extreme pose so like you always have to go on to one of the Peaks or one of the valleys on the curve and the thing is with constant you see these steps but if I actually change it to bezer you can see that these are actual curves right now of course it's not a perfect curve by any means but that's not to worry about right now so you have to imagine it's kind of like a smooth curve from one key to the other this would be like the biggest value towards the right so I'm going to grab everything s y and I'm looking at my character and just making that side to side motion smaller let's play it maybe still a little bit too much let me scale it more and that looks pretty good and something else you want to look at is grabbing the feet and then making sure that while the the foot is planted on the ground the keys on the Y location look like they're moving in a linear fashion here you can see the steps are perfectly equal this is where the foot is on the ground and then once it lifts off the ground it doesn't matter you can just do your own timing but here if I go to if I grab all of the keys and then go to linear you can see this line being perfectly straight and that means that's correct that's what you want so that's the one rule when you're animating treadmills and of course the other rule I actually haven't mentioned it but you might have noticed is that the Torso doesn't move back and forth so on the Y location all of these keys are perfectly still so that's what you want those are the two things you've got to keep in mind and then your treadmill is going to look good so now before we move on to animating any other part of the body we have a little bit more work to do with our legs and we're not going to be putting them into the bezier curves and sply them or anything like that but there are some things you can do to make your timing or your spacing actually more interesting besides the legs actually let's start with the Torso here so as we know we have that left to right sway on the hips which we're keeping subtle but it's there and to make the spacing more interesting what you can do is create some eases so we know we did the 50% breakdowns before so the spacing isn't very interesting thing it's always the same and I was going to say it looks robotic which is ironic cuz we are animating a robot but you know we're not animating like a lifeless machine robot we're animating a character that is alive and bouncy and has has a character so even though he's a robot we still want to animate him like a live being so this linear curve I don't really want that so I'm going to create eases so this is my maximum position I'm going to grab the keys before that and after after that gy and bring them up together at the same time to create an e so now they're closer to this top position and I'm actually going to do the same exact thing on the bottom and if you want to be 100% precise what you have to do is grab one of these keys that you moved and then grab the value from the Key crl C and go down here to this key crl V and then just if it's a positive value that you copied now you just make it a negative value and it popped up a little bit and I'm going to contrl C and contrl V on the other side since those are supposed to be the same and now the spacing on one side and on the other side will be perfectly equal of course if you want to put the time into that and do that that's fine but you can also keep it a little bit organic where you eyeball these things um and that's fine too so when you're doing these eases it's okay to not have it 100% perfect um I don't think anybody's really going to notice unless it's a huge difference but then you would have been able to see it on the curve anyways yeah so I don't know if you can tell but it's just a little bit more Snappy now now the next fun thing I can do for my feet is whenever we have a passing position which is for example frame six and let me go in the front view right now the foot is always the same exact distance from this Center Line just perfectly still always going on a straight line and again a little bit robotic so what we can do is whenever the character's foot is off the ground on these passing positions we can make the foot go a little bit closer to the body and this is just adding a little bit of personality of course you could do going away from the body like kicking away it's just adding just a little bit of spice to the animation so it's still looks pretty neutral but it's just a little bit more interesting so I'm bringing the foot more towards the center conf firming and now I can look at my X location so I'm going to grab this value from the X location and then on my frame 18 which is the other foot I'm going to paste it and just add the negative sign to it so it goes towards the center and for both feet I don't want it to just pop into this position over three frames and then pop back I'm going to grab the key before and after and I'm going to create a little bit of an ease so basically obviously when the foot is planted on the ground you want it to just be still you don't want it to be sliding side the side here the foot is barely lifting off the ground on the down position so I'm just moving it to the side a little bit maybe I'll make it a little bit less actually on this side doesn't have to be equal on both sides and then it's going to be the maximum movement towards the center on frame 18 and then as it's kicking towards the next stride it's going to be moving back into the neutral position I can make this more in the center just to vary the spacing and make it more interesting and I'm going to grab these values from this side and apply them to the other side so let's look at it now from mainly the front view so you can see it's a little bit more fun the character kicks their feet inwards and then kicks them back outwards as they're walking around if you think this is too much you can reduce it but I think it's kind of funky I like it I'm going to leave it something else you'll notice on a human being for example is that the feet are usually not perfectly straight and facing forward but they are a little bit angled outwards so the toes are more outwards than the heels and I think adding add a little bit of that is going to be actually really nice so let's do that let's grab one foot and the axis is our Z rotation I'm going to grab one key and go into my front view actually I'm going to grab the last one as well so our Loop is perfect and just seeing how much of that rotation I want I don't want to go too crazy and I can just delad all of these keys in the middle because there isn't going to be any variation to how much the foot is turned out wordss it's just always going to be the same for me and I'm going to copy that value from one foot grab the other foot on frame one paste It reversed and here I'll paste it onto the last frame as well and delete everything in the middle and now my feet are turned outwards and it looks just that much more natural now and then something else I like to do is again on this crossover pose doing a little bit of this angle on the foot as well on the Y rotation and this is totally optional I just think it looks really nice so I'm just going to do just a little bit maybe like that look at my y rotation and again while the foot is planted you don't want to have any of that change of rotation the foot is just lifting off the ground here I'll have a little bit of it and then in the up pose it can be more before it returns into a neutral pose when the foot is hitting the ground again so it's pretty much the same as we did on the side to side movement on the foot using the same principle of just copying and pasting values from these channels I'm just going to add the same rotation to the other foot so I'll be back okay now let's look at it okay so the feet look a little bit more Flappy more organic it looks like there's more rotation around the ankle and I actually really like that compared to just having it still now let's look at this passing pose again we said when the foot is planted on the ground it has to have a perfectly linear curve but once it's in the air it can be a little bit more fun you can change the spacing a little bit more more and we did that with the down position where the foot just moves forward a little bit but then the rest of the poses here we left the way they were so the spacing is pretty equal and because we move the down pose back like this there's quite a big jump between these two poses so what I like doing is on this crossover or passing position I like bringing that back which adds nice drag to the leg but also makes the spacing snappier and then the the foot kicks forward more and then it hits the stride so now that I have moved this key I'm just going to grab this value and on my stride on the other side on the location what I'm just going to paste it and now it looks the same on that side as well so let's look at that and for this we have to look at the side view mostly because you can't really see that from the front view so again more Snappy looks like a this rotation here where the toes are swinging back and forth see if there's anything else we can do there and that's X rotation so the toes are on the ground here the foot peels off here if we want we can push the drag more then the foot is slowly starting to turn direction and here the heel is on the ground but the toes are in the air so again I moved this so I'm going to copy that value and I'm going I paste it onto the other stride on frame 18 I also like making sure that my up and down on the Torso isn't exactly equal on my stride and then on my passing position which it isn't right now usually the passing position ends up being higher than the stride so that's good just double cheing that and I think I can just bring this stri position a little bit higher and the reason I'm doing that is because I want it to feel like a bouncing ball where the Torso goes higher and then it drops down abruptly and then for the hips for the wire rotation right now again it's perfect perfectly even I can just spice it up a little bit bring these Keys a little bit higher and lower to create a little bit of easing and we can do the same exact thing to this Z rotation and now you can see that the transfer of weight is more Snappy especially the up and down on the Z rotation axis okay make sure you're saving your work and now for this blocking stage I think we can leave the legs the way they are for now and we can move on to animating the head so before I do any offsets on the head I'm just going to animate it moving the opposite way from how the body is moving so on the down position I'm going to give a little bit of upward tilt to the head and then on the opposition I'll give it a little bit of a downward tilt and we're going to look at what it looks like so I'm grabbing the head controller and the up and down is the X rotation so on my down position on frame three I'm going to make the head in its maximum up position and I'm not going to go too crazy cuz I don't want the head to be too wobbly and my other down position is on frame 15 so I can just paste that and on my up position I I can just paste the value and make it positive and my other opposition is on frame 21 so I'm just going to paste that as well and let's play that so you can see especially in this 3/4 view the head is bobbing up and down way too much so right away I'm just going to scale everything down nicely until it's a lot more subtle maybe even more than that and right now the head is perfectly hitting the down rotation when the body is up and vice versa and we want to add a little bit of offset to that uh it doesn't look that great when it's perfectly aligned like that and of course if we were in our splines and we would be adding frames between here maybe we would offset by one or two frames but for now we're just going to keep our keys only on these frames where we already have them so I'm going to grab this x rotation on the head and I'm going to do GX - 3 so now we have an additional key here but that's fine it's outside of our time range we're not going to be seeing that but we have keys exactly in the same places where we had them before and let's play that so the Bob looks more interesting now because there's offset and you can actually read it you can see the drag and the delay on the head which we want to have and let's do the same exact thing to the this little antenna here so the easiest way again to start is on the up position we're going to have it most bend down and paste that onto my other up position grab that value and on my down positions I'm just going to reverse paste it onto my other down value and I'm going to grab the whole thing and GX minus 3 to offset it now let's press play and you can see how good it looks right away looks a lot more alive and it's very bouncy if you want a little bit less bounce you can do that I'm just going to reduce it a little bit and it looks good to me and I'm quickly going to do the same exact thing on these antennas except I'm going to keep it very subtle it depends on what you want if you want them to be very bouncy by Nature you can do a lot of Bounce I like to keep them a little bit more stiff so it's going to be a lot more subtle and instead of the x axis we're using the z-axis here just from looking at it you can tell and doing the same exact thing but I just want to mention that because we're doing a mirror of the same action in this case what you can do is use this butterfly mirror controller so just click on that and now if I have this controller selected and I move it the other one is moving in the exact opposite direction so it saves me sometime instead of having to copy the animation to the other side I can just have it right away so with this button on I'm just going to do the same exact thing we did on the other controllers for the bounce and when you're copying the animation you have to select both controllers because if you just have this one selected and you paste it it's not going to paste on this one even though you have the mirror tool on so I'm just going to grab it now and I actually can turn off the mirror tool now cuz I did my rotation and I'm just pasting opposite Valu so I don't need it on anymore I'm going to turn it off and do the rest and now I'm going to grab everything GX - 3 to offset like before and you can see a little bit of that bounce and it's very subtle like I said if you want it to be more you can but sometimes keeping things subtle is nice too looking at it from the front view we have that side to side motion on the body and I would like to add some of that side to side bounce on this antenna as well so let's do that now so again the easiest thing is finding the extreme positions and then offsetting later so for me the passing positions are the ones where the side to side motion on the Torso is the most extreme as you can see from these values here so this is where just to make things clean I'm just going to use the rotation Z controller so I don't affect the other curves so here the body has already traveled most to the right it will ever go so I'm going to rotate the antenna to the left and so now it's a little bit different instead of pasting the same value on the other passing position I'm going to mirror paste it because we're doing side to side they the opposite extremes so I'll grab this value from the channel box go to frame 18 which is my other passing position paste it and delete this negative sign and now these values in the middle I want them to just be easing on each side so grab these and these values and bring them up so now I have a nice ease in my curve and let's see what that looks like and because we moved the curve before let me just correct that um we want to have the curve exactly from 0 to 24 and now I can actually offset it so so GX - 3 so you will still end up having that first frame on minus 3 but the thing is we had it already by accident before offsetting anything that was my mistake so before you do anything you want to make sure your curve is keyed from 0 to 24 you do your animation and then you offset so nothing happened it's fine I just deleted that extra key I didn't need added the key I needed and then I just offset it afterwards and now we have a little bit of that side to side bounce added to the up and down bounce and it just adds more flavor to the walk I think now we can do a little bit of up and down bounce on the arms as well and that's going to be pretty much the same Principle as we did with these little antennas and yes you can again use your butterfly button to mirror the motion because the arms are always going up together and down together because it's influenced by the up and down motion of the body it's not going to be reversed where one arm is up and the other one is down so let me just do that and again just reinforcing what I said when I made my mistake make sure your keys are from frame zero to frame 24 just makes your life easier you don't have to be deleting anything after okay and let's play that so the arms are moving up and down and let's offset it GX - 3 so let's play it [Music] again now we have a nice up and down on the arms and another thing you can do if you want to but you don't have to is grabbing the arm and then on the Z rotation grab all of the keys and just bringing the arm down in general so it looks more like an arm that's hanging down let me just hide the Gizmo so you can see it better so you can have it lower like that and I'm not just going to move it by an arbitrary number right now because I want to make sure I'm moving both arms down by the same value and I don't want to be going one by one and copy pasting that so what I'm going to do is gy and let's say two two that might be a little too much so let me press the right Mouse controller to cancel that action and do G y.5 and that looks pretty good to me and I'm going to do the same thing on the other side so gy 1.5 is so now we have to reverse it so instead of 1.5 it would be gy minus 1.5 and press enter to confirm or the left Mouse button and now both arms are move down by the same amount so now they're more floppy and hanging at the sides of the body instead of just being straight out which I think is really cute and at this point we're pretty much done I'm just going to save my work play it one more time and everything was good to me so I'm just going to leave it and this last part I'm going to talk about is not about the specific animation but I just want to mention some things about making adjustments to your work so let's pretend that we don't like how the animation looks right now for example we really want these strides to be bigger so we want the character to cover more distance and have the feed more apart than it is now so you have to be aware of the fact that everything affects everything in a walk cycle as you can see from just what we've done already in this lesson the distance of the feet affects how high or low this torso will be because you don't want these feet to be stretching so you can go this high up and then at the the same time if you go too low the character will look like they're crouching while they walk so you have to find the right height for the amount of stride that you're getting for your character and also if you want to swing these hips more or less it could cause problems too cuz if you want more rotation now the legs will be more bent or if you want less rotation maybe the legs will start stretching so that can cause an issue as well um for example if you want this heel to be more closer to the ground again our foot is now stretching so if that's something you really want to do and you make that adjustment then you have to make sure that you're bringing your overall height lower as well so anytime you change one thing you have to change a lot of different things and one of the worst things that you might want to do is actually changing the length of this stride because once you have everything down it just becomes really complicated once you change one side you have to change the other to match them for the loop to look perfect you have to make sure your first and last key are matching as well otherwise there's going to be a pop now that I made the St longer now my legs are stretching so I would have to bring my torso a lot lower but that's also affecting the rest of my animation so instead of just moving it on one frame I got to grab all of these keys and then bring it down maybe even more and then everything else is kind of looking messed up now of course because I didn't change anything else but you get the idea so so again it's normal that you create your walk especially when you're starting out and then you change things but try right away doing your research and maybe like sketch out some ideas or look at some references and kind of figure out what you want the walk to roughly look like and the poses to look like before you commit to it and you create this whole animation and then at the end you decide like oh I don't like this I want to change everything because then it just becomes so confusing that you might well just start over and redo the animation okay so now that we're done let's just do the main takeways from the exercise so for your walk cycle you want to First determine the timing so usually the classic one you do is 25 frames long and we have the handy guide here but you can also do a little bit slower walk with the other guide that we have in the PDF if you want to try that out feel free and go for it see what that looks like and when animating a treadmill you're basically animating a looping animation and the two things you got to keep in mind is that the Torso is always still on the Y AIS or depending on which way you have your character rotated but in this case it's the Y AIS it's the back and forth motion there isn't any back and forth motion there's just an up and down and side to side and for these feet whenever the heel touches the ground and up until the next stride when it's leaving the ground the motion has to be perfect perly linear so the distance between these Keys the value distance has to be the exact same it has to be 50% the easiest way to do that is by using your shift e and getting that 50% value in that bar up here and then obviously the hips whenever the foot is carrying the weight on these passing positions the hip on that side has to be higher than the other side and then on these strides when the feet are the most far apart you have rotation on these hips on the Y rotation axis whenever the feet are firmly planted on the ground you want to make sure that there is no rotation on this heel controller so it looks like the character is nice and steady on his feet and then once you have all of your poses done nicely and mirror paste it onto the other side you can add a little bit of easing uh on some of these controllers like for example the side to side motion on the hips as you can see we ease that on each side um you can either copy and paste the perfect values or you can just eyeball it to make the curve look even on each side then after you have all that figured out and your walk looks good only then you can do the fun stuff with for example adding the Bob on the head or on the antenna and the arms and you can do some other fun stuff like we did with the feet kind of going inwards and tilting this way a little bit when they're lifted off the ground but then when they're planted on the floor you got to make sure they're nice and flat so there's a lot of Spun stuff you can do in a walk of course right now we just did a tiny bit because we don't want to over complicate things and we're keeping things on this constant interpolation so the animation looks a little bit poppy right now but we're going to be doing another walk cycle and we're going to be splining it and that comes with a lot of other challenges where the walk starts looking really ugly once you spline it and then you have to change a bunch of stuff to make it look good again which you're going to find out splining or animation is is just a whole other beast but we're going to get there slowly so don't worry about it just focus on getting these main walk cycop poses in this exercise and that other secondary action on these antennas and arms and that's it for today good luck and we'll see you in the next lesson I hope you enjoyed that lesson and animated your very first walk cycle in blender now this was the final exercise of the beginner section of our ultimate animation course one of over a hundred different lessons as well as of course movie quality Rigs and props animation ready sets 100 plus custom made dialogue Clips a private community and a ton more stuff so if all that stuff interests you but you're still not fully sure you can head over to t.ca learn a little bit more and you can make your final decision with that happy animating and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: BrianKouhi

Views: 6,975

Keywords: how to animate a walk cycle, animating your first walk cycle in blender, walk cycle tutorial, how to animate a walk cycle in Blender, blender walk cycle tutorial, walk cycle animation, free blender rig, blender character rig, blender animation rig, Free Blender animation rig, how to animate a walk in Blender

Id: 1Su0-Gh6ilM

Length: 57min 18sec (3438 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024