When it comes to character animations,
what do you think is the most important animation or action
you should know how to animate? I'll give you a hint in something. We all do everything all day over. If your answer was talking,
then you'd be wrong. The most important animation
you can master is the walk cycle. Why Well, I'll tell you, every lesson
you need to learn in order to animate your characters well can be
learned through mastering the walk cycle. Walk cycles are the foundation
of character movement. In this lesson,
I'll attempt to simplify the walk cycle into individual, easily
digestible components as well. As share my process for quickly
creating a base walk cycle that can then be modified
and built upon to tell a story. So let's not waste
any more time and dove right in. Are you kidding me? Another Walk Cycle Tutorial. Well, this week's video is actually
a lesson from my course on character animation called Character
Animation Launchpad. To learn more about the course, stick
around to the end of the video. But for now, enjoy this free lesson. All right, Norm, roll it. Since we are creating a looped animation,
all I have to do is animate two steps. We can break the animation of the walk
cycle into three major components. The body, which includes the head
and neck, the legs, and the arms. I like to start with the body
because everything on our character is either directly
or indirectly parroted back to the body, which means that the motion of the body
affects the motion of everything else. So it makes sense to start there. Once I'm done with the body,
I like to move on to the legs. Next and then finish with the arms. I like to nail down
the animation of the legs before the arms, because once the animation of our legs
is established, that will help us determine
the animation of the arms, which always swing in the opposite
direction of the corresponding leg. OK, so with that little roadmap laid out,
let's get started on how to animate the body. So like I said, to create a loop,
I just need to create two steps and that means I need my body
to bob up and down just twice To create this, I'll divide my work area,
which is set to six frames long in half, and create a key
frame on the middle frame. Then I'll copy that key frame and paste it to the first and last
frame of the work area. Now there are two things
we need to remember when creating a looped animation correctly. First, always remember to place your last keyframes
so that they line up with the end bracket. Second, make sure that the first and last
key frames are the same. So any time you make an adjustment
to either of these keyframes, remember to copy
and paste them to maintain the loop. So these
three key frames that we just created are going to be the low
point of our bodies up and down motion. This is what is called the contact pose,
which is when both feet are contacting the ground
at the same time. We want the position of the body
to be just low enough that there will be some bending of the knee. If you need to adjust this, select
all the key frames with your playhead on one of the key frames
you can adjust all three key frames at the same time
to bring your character's body down. I'll bring all three key frames down
just until the knee is bent a little bit. Note that you don't have to commit
to this. We can always come back later
and adjust this. Next, we'll create a high position
in between these key frames. Select both of these new key frames
and then move your body up
until the legs are more or less straight. For now, I'll select all these key frames
and hit F nine to apply a default easy ease
to our key frames. And then on these two key frames
where our body is at the highest point I'll adjust the easing influence
by opening the key frame velocity default. Easing influence is around 33%,
but we want to increase the easing on these key frames
to about 80%. This will serve to accentuate the body's
balancing is how much you increase. This really depends on your own
individual taste. I'll take this moment to do a quick ramp
preview to assess how the animation is looking so far,
and I think it's looking pretty good. Now we're going to emphasize the bouncy
ness of the character by adding in some rotation keyframes
to this animation, create a key frame on the rotation
to correspond with each position keyframe. Then on the contact key frames, remember
that these three key frames rotate the body forward a little bit, then select
the key frames and bump them forward. One frame or two frames if you're
animating on ones or 24 frames per second. Then I'll click on the rotation
stopwatch and add a loop in expression, select
the rotation and copy it. This will copy the key frames
and that loop in expression we just added and we're going to paste those on the rotation of the neck layer
and then offset that by one frame. And then we're going
to do the same for the head. And with that, I am pretty much done with this stage of the animation
and can move on to the legs. Hey, I just wanted to pop in and pause
the video for a quick reminder to hit that like button and help me defeat my arch
nemesis, the YouTube algorithm. The more likes I get, the stronger
I become as I battle it out to beat the algorithm
and reach more people. If you hit that like button,
all appreciate. And let's get back to the lesson. To recap what we just did, we created
two up and down motions for each step. We adjusted the easing
to enhance the bouncing s, and then we added
some rotation to the body so that it would lean forward
on the down position. And then we copied those rotation
keyframes and pasted them to the neck and head while also offsetting each layer
to add some overlapping action. To animate the legs. I'll start with the right ankle
by bringing up the position on that layer by hitting P on my keyboard. On the first frame,
I'm going to bring the foot back. Then I'll copy that keyframe
and paste it on the last frame of my loop. Then in the middle, I'll bring my ankle
forward. Just out in front of the body. So now we have the back and forth
motion. Next. All right, click on the position and click separate dimensions
so that we have keyframe able properties for X and Y position on the first half
where the foot is moving forward. I'll add a keyframe on the Y position to bring the foot up as it comes forward. Now I'm going to hold Shift and R
so that I can add the rotation property to my solo properties here
and I'll create a keyframe on the rotation to correspond
with each keyframe on the Y position. Then when the foot lifts, all adjust the rotation
so that the foot is pointed downward Then right before the foot is planted on
the ground, I'll add another rotation keyframe
and point the foot slightly up. And then I'm going to budge this middle
keyframe over one, having these rotation key frames on either
side of the middle keyframes. Makes it appear that the heel hits
the ground first as our character takes a step. It's the small little details that matter. Next, we'll add a loop in expression
to all three properties. Then I'm going to select The Keyframes
and copy them. Then on the left ankle,
I'll bring my Playhead to the middle frame and paste those key frames from here. We may need to make some adjustments
to the X property until the length of the stride
looks about. Right. Now here's
a tip to improve your animations. If you go into your ankle controller
setting and open up dynamic section,
there is a property called Anti Pop. Crank this puppy up and see what happens. That anti pop just adds a little bit
of a buffer to the length of your limb so that the leg doesn't bend so abruptly
as your character plants their foot This is a common problem in animating
and after effects, and we can get around it with this anti
pop feature that is included with limber. Now the legs are pretty much done,
but before we move on to the arms, there is one little adjustment
we need to go back and make to the body. Let's go back to the body and add a loop
in expression to the position. Then select all the keyframes on the body,
neck and head, and let's nudge them down one frame
Why did we do this? Well, as Richard Williams
puts in the animator survival kit, walking is a process of falling over
and catching yourself just in time. So that means that the lowest part
of our bodies motion of that up and down motion should happen on the frame after
the foot makes contact with the ground. To catch the our character from falling. This delay in the body's
motion is called overlapping action. I purposely waited until we were done
animating the legs in order to illustrate the relationship
that the body's motion has to the legs. Now, to
recap what we just did with the legs. First
we animated the back and forth motion. Then we added the up and down motion. Then we added the rotation of the foot in. Then we added a loop in expression
to the position and rotation properties so that we can copy those keyframes
and paste them in the middle of the composition
on the left ankle, thus offsetting the steps of each ankle
from each other. Then we tightened up the animation
by cranking up the anti pop setting on both legs. Then to finish up this section,
we went back to offset the body keyframes by one frame so that we can get
a more realistic motion. OK, so now we are ready to move on
to the arms We'll be animating the arms differently
then how we animated the legs. Instead of key framing the position of the
wrist controller to move back and forth. We are going to be using what is called f
k, which means I'll create the movement of the arms by key framing the rotation
of each joint manually to switch to f k. I just need to have this setting cranked
all the way up to 100. Now, whenever animating with f k,
I do need to make sure that I've created an f k controller
with the add f k button, and then I need to pick up my hand layer to that controller
instead of the original wrist controller. You might be wondering
why I want to manually keyframe the rotation of the joints instead of just keyframe in the position
of the wrist to swing back and forth. The simple answer is that swinging motion like the arms swinging back and forth
as our character walks turn out better when we use f k
instead of the traditional IK. The main reason is the f k just
naturally creates this marking motion. I'll create keyframes
for the upper and lower rotation. Then on the rotation of the f k controller
layer using these three rotation properties. I'll swing my arm forward
because the right leg starts backward. And remember
I mentioned that the arms motion is always supposed to be going in the opposite
direction of the corresponding leg. Now, just like always, I'll copy
these first set of keyframes and paste them to the end,
and then I'll go to the middle and I'll move my arm backward
so that it's going back now. Then I'll add a loop in expression
to all the keyframe properties, noting that on the left wrist controller will have to add the loop in expression
all the way at the bottom. We do not want to mess
with any of this stuff. Next, I'll offset each row of key frames by one frame,
starting with the upper rotation. So I'll offset the lower f k by one
frame from the upper f k, and I'll offset the rest by one
frame from the lower f k keyframes. Now that we are done with the right arm
just like with the legs, we'll save some time
by copying the key frames and pasting them on the left
wrist at the halfway point. However, for the risk controllers,
we don't want to copy these key frames over
because we'll inadvertently copy the expressions as well
and we don't want to do that so in this case
we'll have to manually keyframe the rotation and and add
in that loop expression. On the left. F-k Risk Controller. Now there's one last adjustment
that we need to make before we're done with this walk cycle. The point at which are furthest apart should line up
with the down position of our body. So just like with the body will offset
the arm rotation key frames one frame so that the upper rotation key frames
line up with our body at its lowest point. So for the final recap,
we switch the arms to RFK and created an RFK risk controller
that we pick with our hand. Layer two. Then we keyframe the rotation
of the shoulder, elbow and wrist to swing back and forth,
then offset the keyframes for each joint by one frame from the joint
above, starting with the shoulder. Then we copied that animation
to the other arm and offset the animation of both arms by one frame to line up with the motion of the body. So that's it. That is how you create a base walk cycle. Now that we understand
how the different parts of a walk cycle work together and fit together,
we can explore some ways of tweaking those different components
to give the walk cycle character and to tell a story which we continue
to explore in the course. What we just created is
just a simple template that can be built upon to create more unique
and interesting animations. Also, allow me to insert a disclaimer here
that this is just the beginning there are more aspects to walk cycle
that we just can't cover in one video. My goal with this lesson is just to provide a workable
starting point to nail down the basics If you enjoyed this lesson,
go check out character animation launchpad where I elaborate on walk cycles even more
and I cover everything from character design
to rigging to animation as well as some more advanced techniques like foreshortening
and 2.5 D character animations. In the course, I teach you
how to use limber to its force potential. I teach things like how to create a head
rig that can express emotions with do it and how to plan and execute more advanced character
animations that involve perspectives plus a bunch of other tricks
and tips of the trade. If you're interested in learning
more about the course, I've left the link in the description below Well, that about
does it for this week's video. Once again, if you enjoyed this video,
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