Blender Character Animation: Walk Cycle

welcome to the fifth episode of this character creation series so today at last we're going to be animating our little character if you haven't been following along with the other parts and are just interested in this animation episode you can download the starting file from the description but in any case we've got a lot of work ahead of us so let's get started all right so we're going to begin by blocking in the sort of basic movement of their legs and while we're doing this having the arms in view can be a little bit annoying so I'm actually going to go into edit mode on the mesh and just going to face mode with control tab let's press C to ring up this little selection tool I'm just going to select the arms and I can just select the hat as well just by hovering over and pressing L press P and just say separate by selection and then if I go into object mode and just select this whole bit can just press H to hide that and I'll do a similar thing in pose mode on the actual rig just hide all of these bones that will not be working with for now just select them and press H and I've got a nice little simplified view of our character and you can just split the window by dragging up then that top right corner you'll turn this into a dopesheet window and I'm going to change the type to an action editor create a new action and I'm just going to call this walk underscore blocking this is our blocking phase and also just going to press this little F a sign over here which just saves this this action so that it never gets deleted I'm going to zoom in a bit all right also going to change the active keying set share to location and rotation and now we can begin making our first pose so we're going to start with the contact pose so just going to drag out the leg of the foot is basically this could be the heel will just sort of be hitting the ground now and drag the other leg out use this little foot control bone to just roll it up onto the ball of the foot something like that I hand from front view I am going to rotate the foot out just a little bit on the z-axis I'm actually going to see exactly how much I'm rotating it I might just press 7 yeah I'll rotate it 7 degrees and for the other foot I'll rotate that negative 7 degrees and also just bring them in a little bit closer on the x axis unless you want to throw very much a walk style but otherwise the feet are usually not that far apart and a walk um let's see I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to go on to this this chest bone here and in the bone properties I'm just going to turn off inherit rotation so now when I move this can get this sort of effect because while you're walking it tends to be that as this sort of as the hips rotate this sort of upper body a part of the body sort of counteract set rotation all right so let's see if I go into top view I think we can just have this let's rotate it a little bit just towards the leg that is currently striking the ground and we can also just rotate it a little bit like that and have the chest sort of counteracting that rotation all right so that is probably just about done for our first pose or maybe just rotate them the whole throat also just a little bit forwards you can select everything with a and press I to insert a keyframe all right so we want to skip head to frame 9 and we're going to be doing a 16 frame walk cycle so we start on frame 1 and we end on frame 17 so 9 is just the frame right in the middle of those two and it's what we refer to as our passing position and for this pose we're just going to reset the rotation of that leg is going to be right in the center here and this foot is Jessica literally passing and the whole body is slightly higher up just since I reset the rotation on this foot I'm going to want to go ro z and seven degrees again and bring this rotation slightly back now the whole sort of weight of the body sort of shifts over the sort of leg that's supporting the entire weight of the body at the moment but what also happens is the torso starts to rotate just to sort of give some little force to this leg that's that's currently swinging here and the rotation starts to go over run to the other side of the body so we can just slowly bring that across like that and the chest already starting to counteract the rotation all right compress I and set the keyframe we can just press some control C over the viewport to copy this pose and want to go to a frame 17 and just press shift ctrl V to paste in a reversed pose just press I so now we have something like this what I do want to do is just select everything and press T while hovering over the dope sheet view and I want to change the interpolation to constant which just means that we're not going to see any sort of tweening at the moment it's only going to change the frame once it actually hits the keyframe it's just a sort of nicer mode to work in when you're just sort of trying to block out your animation and you're not worrying about all that sort of little in between steps so now we're good we want to do is fill in the two in between poses over here and over here so this is the down pose and it's the sort of lowest that the body ever gets and over here is going to be the up those which is the highest the body ever gets so let's start with the down pose the foot will be completely down on the ground can bring the whole body down a bit just get my foot rotation back this will be sort of starting to slide over I'll be rotating this way slightly you all right and as for the back leg this will be just about ready to leave the ground just something like that we can set that keyframe and now go to frame 13 and as I said this is the highest pose we could want to swing this foot along this foot is just sort of swung past year this foot is going back and we're going to bring it up a little bit already on the ball of the foot and try bring the whole body up a little bit higher you okay at this point we're um wanting to rotate a little bit over this leg that's passing we don't want this load to be completely straight otherwise we get the sort of a knee pop so it will just raise this up a tiny bit more and let's insert that keyframe and see what this is looking like all right to get a better idea of it let's I just fill in the other key frames for the other half of the cycle so we'll just be copying these essentially I'll just select all of these just excluding this first column of frames just shift D duplicate those stick it here starting on frame 21 for just select everything ctrl C shift ctrl V let's press I to insert the reverse pose just go through all of them and do that you you okay so we're ending on friends so we just want to set our end frame to 32 and now we can see it being played through I'll just hide the bones quickly you okay not bad just going to bring my bones back let's see one thing I would like is that Jung at this point yell when the foot is sort of hitting the ground I want the toes to be just sort of pointing up slightly so I'll just insert that I'll press control-c and just shift ctrl V to do the same thing on this first and end pose oops shift ctrl V all right and maybe here is the sort of as the foot is passing we can just get a bit of sort of fluidity just by making the toes Bend back slightly just insert a keyframe there maybe they've still bent a little bit over here do the same for this foot all right yeah it just gives it a little bit more life I find okay so that's looking good let us see if we can put the arms in now so I'll just press alt H to unhide all of these bones go into object mode alt H to bring the arms back I'll select this little object here shift right click to select the body and press ctrl J to join them up again and now it's important that we going to edit mode and just select everything and press W and remove doubles just all merge nicely together again and I'll get looking funny with the arms just sticking out like that um but we'll fix that now so once again I'm going to cut out a bit of the mesh um I want to just cut out the left arm just so I'm only working with one arm at a time I'll just cut out the hat as well not sure why it's just bothersome I hide that and I'm going to select all the bones and I'll just deselect these two arm bones and maybe the one hand bone and this little vert also hip bone here I'll hide everything else and I'll starting on frame 1 so this leg is forward so we want to be on to be bending backwards you let's make it a little bit closer to the body have it quite straight we don't want to put it too far out back the UM doesn't really go that far doesn't sort of swing that far back in in a walk unless it's a roof you know particularly angry walk or something maybe also have this on a sort of going swinging slightly back can insert that keyframe and let's go to this past in over here just swing it down by side and set the keyframe and we can go to the other contact position and something like this perhaps insert I'm going to turn this also into to constant interpolation just by selecting all the keyframes and same constant now if we go into this in-between frame here we can press shifty and we've got this breakdown slider which sort of interpolates between the two key frames just so we can get an idea of sort of maybe put it at like somewhere around 40% and in set that keyframe yes that sort of starts swinging more slowly and then it accelerates same thing here you now as it's not swinging back we swing this back slide if I'm going to make this continue to go up and the hand sort of continue to go up with it and set there and now it needs to swing back I'll just copy this pose over here you you and old press shifty and just paste all these uh keyframes in here you all right let's have a look at this you I'm going to switch these arm arm friends back into a Bezier interpolation for a moment yeah us already looking pretty good I think for this curve up most swing of the arm here on the contact position you want to rotate it in a little bit just a bit in front of the body and set that keyframe okay it's going to need some tweaking now that we've done that you you yes it's looking ok from the side view but from front view it looks very weird so you can just maybe have it start swinging and a little bit earlier and that looks much better you okay I'm going to select everything prestige to constant mode and I'm going to try to get my other arm back now if I can press alt H to show all of the other bones all to H and object mode and just do the same thing to join these together ctrl J W remove double the same object in edit mode and now we want to go ahead and hmm what's the best way to do this let's select only these arm bones just ignore of the finger bones arm and press shift H to only have those selected and now we can just select this whole arm here and press control C shift ctrl V to copy the pose onto this arm here then we'll select everything I to insert the keyframe on the other arm or basically just go through all of these frames just repeating that process you you you you you you you all right so we have them all now of course our arm swing is uh they just change this to constant on all of them arm swings a little bit funny having both of the arm swinging the same direction but Chum will fix that now so the way we're going to do that let's just select this left side or well it's actually his right side um select all of the keyframes are pertaining to that to that right side and let's find our central pose the sort of one on frame 17 just press G and drag all of these keyframes along I just to offset it by half of the cycle and then numb we can select these frames here and we screw press shift D to duplicate them and put them at the NGO and I couldn't select these sort of extraneous ones and just press X to delete and now it should all be lined up okay that's looking good press alt H to stop the animation all to H to unhide everything and just have one last look at this you know I guess the one thing that we could do is just dumb stop these thumbs from sticking out so unnaturally I'll just rotate them down a little bit you something like that you okay and because I haven't inserted any keyframes for any of these bones yet I just have to insert one frame just on the first first frame and they'll stay on that pose you all right so we're finished with the blocking phase so what I'm going to do is I'm going to press this little two over here and it's going to create a copy so now we can call this walk underscore polish maybe so now we'll work on this we should also press F on this and if you ever want to go back to our blocking phase if we say screw up our polish phase can revert back to our blocking phase very easily all right so on to walk polish go to select everything press T and choose Bezier interpolation and don't worry if everything looks a little bit weird this is actually not looking that that bad from the outset but definitely a lot of tweaking that needs to be done okay so probably the first thing to look at are the feet once the heels will strikes the ground it really doesn't take that long for the feet to sort of come flat maybe one or two frames at most really I'm going to go two frames from the contact position just press alt R and move this a little bit along the y-axis also just rotate this at 7 degrees again on these z axis it looks like it's not quite on the ground yeah I must have been a little bit sloppy when I was doing these initial frames sir not quite actually hitting the ground I'll just quickly go through and correct that you oops maybe give it a little bit of foot roll already just so they can reach the ground you you okay and let's do the same thing for the other foot two frames after the contact position alt are negative seven degrees on the z axis bring it back a little bit on the y axis and just make sure it's actually touching the ground properly you you you okay looking better this little toe animation I did is really looking completely ridiculous actually so let's get rid of that or at least make it much more subtle just reset the rotation and just do it a tiny bit I'm just done shifty duplicate that over to the end and press control-c go to this frame 17 shift control V and insert a keyframe for the other foot as well see how that's looking much more respectable I'm worried about what's happening to the leg yeah we've got a tiny little knee pop over here um you can see that it just over extends a little bit too much just for one or two frames so let's see where is that that is on frame nine guess it starts a little friend ten yes sort of present frame ten and eleven and then it's okay so for frame ten and eleven just increase the foot roll slightly can see just let it's not got that complete rigidity to the leg let's give it a little bit more actually frame 11 same story okay let's do the same thing for the other leg just bring it up slightly you all right let's have a look at that all right they're looking much smooth enough see what else do we want to do these arms are maybe coming to a bit of an abrupt halt at the at the back end of the swing maybe what we can do is just make the contact pose um just have a bit more swing back something like that and I'll just copy that to the end control c4m 70-inch if control V and insert the keyframes okay so now for these frames here we we'll make the transition less harsh now you you it's looking better just need to make the same changes on the other side made it so that this passing position here have still got a slight rotation of the forearm because they're just snapping back a little bit too fast and press control freak over to the other side you these are eluate you yeah that's looking pretty nice I think maybe one change that I'd like to have is just where the foot leaves the ground is not so good maybe this back foot so we will have on this down pose um see to reset that rotation I have something like rather with the whole foot actually rotated oops I forgot to set a keyframe for that yeah I think it is better like that we just have keep these toes from going through the ground all right let's do the same thing for the other foot so here instead of having the foot roll something like that okay once again good after keep these toes on the ground you okay so that's looking pretty good for half an hour's work it's maybe still a little bit rough around the edges but really not looking too bad I think to finish off let us make them walk along a path because that's always cool to do let me just show my armature again I'm going to once again credit copy and instead of walk polish this will just be called walk sort of the walk final if you want press f1 cm let's go into the NLA editor and just click this little button over here press N and find repeat and just set that to some big number like 50 and we'll set our end frame another big number doesn't really matter so now I'll just keep bar looping and in object mode press shift C to center the cursor shift a and let's add in a path curve just go from the top rotate this 90 degrees and we can just drag this out all these little vertices maybe let's make a little curved chess on my circular path something like that follow the path just by selecting the armature in object mode shift right-click select the path control P and there we can just say path constraint click that and let's see if we go into the armature here we can just say animate path all right is now following the path but his rotation is not correct let's see what we can do to fix that see if we click follow curve that should help and I'll just invert the y-axis all right so now he's following the path nicely is going much too fast of course we just go into the curved properties we can set the frame time the sort of end frame so maybe make that 350 let's see how that looks yeah that's probably just about right it's a bit of a slow walk on maybe change this down to 300 you shift spacing up to full screen mode just maybe a hide the armature here all right well I think it's looking pretty satisfactory I think we can be pleased with what we've accomplished in the past half hour so um if you have any questions just leave a comment likewise if you have any suggestions for a future video I'm always open to suggestions of course and yeah hope you enjoyed and learn something and I'll see you next time Cheers

Channel: Sebastian Lague

Views: 629,611

Keywords: Blender (Software), animation, blender tutorial, game model, walk cycle, walk animation

Id: DuUWxUitJos

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 12 2015