Ooh what's up guys! Before I start I wanted to tell you that a couple of weeks ago my 2nd daughter was born, so this tutorial comes with the smell of fart, poop, pee and vomit included. It is what has to procreate. Come on, let's go there. Walking could be said to be one of the simplest things in the world, right? good for some more than others, but it is that it is trying to do it in animation and it seems that our characters suffer from one of the typical diseases such as ice skater syndrome, where their feet are slipping on the ground, or impalement syndrome , where it looks like he has a stick up his ass and he doesn't move his body, or c3po syndrome, where he moves his arms just like his legs or everything looks stiff in general. Come on and another bonus, Nacho Vidal syndrome, where some limb is stretched more than necessary. Luckily this has a solution, so don't worry because by the end of this tutorial we'll finally know how to make our character know how to walk sideways like a normal humanoid. The truth is that character animation is valid for a lot of things and gives a lot of play, from super creative infinite loops like this one from 2veinte, to the typical ones that are requested in the world of Motion graphics, especially in video projects explanatory. If we look at the most important motion studios, there are times when it seems that the characters have much more life or personality than normal, and that is that they are usually made frame by frame in some drawing program. And I think that's the key in character animation. Be that as it may, animating a character in a cool way is something that takes time, but if we have it under control, we can apply it to the projects we want and charge more for it. So in this video we are going to see how to make them in a more traditional way, that is, frame by frame. Don't worry it's easy. We will do it using a program that we use to make any traditional animation, in my case I will use Adobe Animate to make the sketch, and then we will use it in After Effects to polish it until the final result. Come on, let's start with the theory. We take out the book from the animator's survival kit and go to the page… How? Ah okay. They tell me through the earpiece that we don't have time for this, so nothing guys, let's go directly to practice If you have never used adobe animate, as was my case, I'm going to quickly teach you the couple of things we need to know to get by . First of all, tell them that the logical thing to draw is to use a graphics tablet, because with the mouse we are going to get a churro. I leave you here below in the description the one I am using for this tutorial. Okay, first of all, when we create our project, we give it the size we need, in this case 1920 x 1080, and we set it to 24 frames. Here on the left we have the tools and here below the timeline. Of the tools we are only going to use a couple of them: The brush or fluid brush, to draw the sketches. Use the one that annoys you the most. We activate it with the B key, from Bigfoot... Okay, let's continue as normal. We can resize it here on the right. The eraser to remove some shit. We activate it with the E key. And the free transformation tool, to move, rotate, deform and scale the drawing that we select. We activate it with the Q. Ok, let's see what we need to know about the timeline: Here on the left is where we are going to create or eliminate our layers, deactivate them or lock them, similar to the after we go. And here on the right we have everything to control the drawings. These little rectangles are the frames. If they are empty they look dark, but if they have any drawing they look normal. (Draw face) If we want the drawing to last longer on the screen, we hit F5. The little rectangles with a circle below are the keyframes, and the ones with nothing on them are the normal frames. If we want it to last less, we give Shift F5. To duplicate the frame we do it with F6. This is key to making any subtle changes between one drawing and another without having to draw it all over again. If we give shift F6 we delete the keyframes. To create empty frames we do it with F7. To move around the timeline we do it by dragging the marker, or with the semicolon. If we select many frames we can create or delete all at once. With this we can control the time of each drawing and others. It can be a bit of a mess at first, eh, but you get the hang of it easily. To visualize what we have done, instead of with the space, it is with the enter. If we want the animation to loop, we can do it with this little arrow and select the range we want. We can also go up to control and hit play indefinitely. One of the most important things is the onion skin, which we activate or deactivate in these two little balls here. With this we can see both the past and the future (Doctor Strange) of our animation, to have a reference when drawing. You can modify the range of frames that we want to see and in advanced settings we can change the colors for example. And finally, if we want to select many drawings at the same time and modify them en bloc, we do it with this tool here, the one to edit several frames at the same time, which is similar to onion skinning. With this guys we are ready for what is to come. Well, let's see how to do a basic walk and what we can vary to give it one feeling or another, since each person walks differently, right? A normal walk can last approximately 16 frames, and can be broken down into 4 different key poses: The contact pose, the down, the step and the up. Then the contact is repeated again and again. With these 4 loop drawings we can already see how our character is going to walk. Come on, let's draw a little to see some examples. The first thing we can do is create a layer with a line on the ground and another for the height of the head as guides. We increased their duration up to 16 frames. In another layer we are going to draw the structure of a character. We're going to do something normal, but it can be whatever you want. We can draw a reference point on the body to draw the legs and another for the arms. The 1st pose that we are going to draw is the most important of all... the contact pose... ehem, alien. (News article) In this pose we put the right leg in front stretched and supporting the heel. We put the left leg behind semi-flexed and supporting the toes. The 2nd pose that we are going to draw is the Step pose, in frame 9, in the middle. Here stretch the right leg at body level, it rises, and the left leg is flexed. If we put these two drawings on a loop, you can see more or less how the walk would look. This pose is also very important, because it is the one that we can vary the most to give a different feeling to the walk. We could make a sad walk if we hunch it down for example. Or the other way around, a euphoric if we stick out our chest. Ok, we return to the normal step pose that we had done and we are going to create the 3rd pose , which is the descent pose. This goes between the 1st contact pose and the step pose. In frame 5. Here flex the front leg and support the entire sole in the middle between the two poses, so that the movement on the ground is linear and constant. The back leg begins to lift off the ground. The body leans forward a little due to inertia. The arms would reach their maximum width but we see it later so as not to get involved. Now we only have the climb pose left, which goes between the step pose and the second contact pose, in frame 13. If we want to have the reference we can select the 1st contact keyframe and put it here while keeping alt pressed to duplicate it. In this rising pose is where we raise the body the most because the stretched foot stands on tiptoe. The foot that is flexed in the air lowers the instep. The body leans forward a little as if it were going to fall before contact. We already have our structure running, so it's time to adjust what we see to leave it as we want. Better now that there are 5 drawings than later when there are gazillions or we're at the after party, right? Now we are going to fill in the gaps, i.e. create the in-betweens between the key poses, to make it look more fluid. The key poses are set every 4 frames, so we're going to create intermediate drawings every 2 frames. We can create some kind of marks on the ground equidistantly to know where the feet have to go more or less so that it moves linearly. Now it is simply to fill in between one pose and another with the help of this onion skin. Well, we would have already walked it. This is getting better and better with practice, don't worry. A little trick to check that the feet are going well is to create a guide layer and mark where the heel passes. It should be similar to a drop, rounded behind. If it's not quite there we can correct it now. Well, the next thing we can do now are the arms, so we create a new layer and on each pose we draw the arms. We take into account that they go in the opposite direction to the feet and that the descent pose is where the arms are more open. We can look at the reference without fear to guide us. Then I'll show you a way to make them without a problem, but for now, that's how it works. Once we have all this working, it is only a matter of selecting all the frames that we have made, and with the alt pressed we duplicate them from frame 17. We modify the range of the loop and we would already have the walking cycle working to be able to draw both legs passing behind and in front. (Show example) With this walk functioning as a base, things have to be done very badly so that in the end we end up with a lousy walk. That's why it's cool to animate characters in this way, since it's fast and can be corrected on the fly. I show you here a couple of examples with different types of characters to give you an idea of how they could walk according to their size. Well, we would only have to focus on adapting a design above it. As I did for example with the character this Post apocalyptic. Now let's see all this with a practical example. By the way, if you are seeing that this is what you really want to dedicate yourself to but you see that with loose tutorials everything is a bit crazy and media is lost in general, I remind you that the guys from LABASAD, who are cool people, have just released a new online master's degree in Motion Graphics, focused above all on mastering After Effects and C4D. What they usually ask for in any job offer as an animator today. (The perfect combo between 2D and 3D to create super colorful videos.) (web)
Of course, the master lasts a whole year, in which they are going to have to work hard doing non-stop exercises and receiving personalized feedback from the teachers of the master, who are professionals in the motion industry. The master's degree starts in November this year so if you want more information, I'll leave a link below in the description so you can ask whatever you want. Come on, let's apply all this to a typical scene that can come out in any project, like this one of a guy walking through a park. They are ready? Come on, let's go. We import the styleframe into a new project. We give it the duration of a normal walk, that is 16 frames. We put it as a guide layer so that it is not exported at the end. We lower the opacity to better see what we are doing and we block it. We create a new layer as a guide for the ground and head. We can put some vertical marks at the same distance from each one, so we know more or less where you have to place your foot on each step so that you don't slip. Now we can create a layer with what would be the pelvis, the little dot to remove the legs and also, a little trick, we can put an arched guide where the knee would pass, so that they do not change in size inadvertently. Instead of creating the feet directly, we can start by animating the pelvis with the guide. We create the empty keyframes for the 4 poses, copy the drawing and paste in the same place with shift + command or control + v, and with the up and down arrows we place it where we want. The descent pose is lower than the contact pose, the step pose is a little higher than the contact pose, and the climb pose is a little higher still. We hit play and we can already see how the body would oscillate when walking. It can be made very subtle or very exaggerated, whatever you need. Ok now we create a new layer for the feet. As we learned before, we are creating the 4 poses. We start with the contact pose. We can put a few dots on the knee so that we can guide ourselves better later. We hit play to see how it turns out... ok, it works and the feet are well spaced. Now we are going to create the in-betweens of the pelvis. We create the empty keyframes, and we paste the same as before. We can stick them in the middle of each pose to make the movement more linear, or we can favor one or the other pose to give the walk more of a sense of weight. Let's go with the intermediates of the feet. The blessed guides help us to know where to place each thing much easier, huh? We can check the heels with the dot technique. Something can always be improved. Remember that the magic is in the small details. Okay, we'd have our legs working by now. Now we can create a layer with the body and the guide for the arms, which we can put into one, with a couple of arc lines for the elbows and wrists. We can then duplicate an entire arm and reposition it to its other location. And we animate just like we did with the pelvis, copying and pasting. We can take into account that the body when going down and up leans a little due to inertia, although that can be done very easily later in the after. Instead of creating the arms now, we can duplicate all of this that we have, down to 32 frames. Now we create a layer to make 1 arm. We cheer you on from start to finish quietly. I would advise you to do it in 3 parts, starting with the arm, then the forearm, and then the hand. This way we control a little better the overlapping of the hand. Once we have it, we duplicate the layer, we drag the keyframes to the middle of the cycle, from frame 17, and the 2nd half that is left over we drag it to the beginning. We would already have it working, we just have to activate the option to edit many frames at once, put the full range, select everything and drag where we want. We would already have the skeleton of our walk ready for our character. Now depending on how it is, we will draw some things here in Animate or directly in After. I'm going to do the legs quickly as an example to see how it would look like I did with the guy from the future since the pants changed shape, but I think that in this case everything can be done easily within AFTER EFFECTS, based on layers of shapes with narrowed stroke. If you want to do everything in the Animate, I advise you to create layers for each element of the body. Well come on, let's export what we've done. We can do it manually by going to file, publication configuration, we choose where we save it, we remove the html wrapper and the include hidden layers, we click publish and accept. This creates a file that we will put in the After. Not long ago I got Timelord, a plugin similar to Overlord. It 's cool because with a click we already pass all the selected layers to the after comp automatically and they are already separated to do what we want, such as changing their opacity, colors, deactivating them or whatever. I leave a link in the description so you can take a look, because it works the same for photoshop. And now as always, let's go to the After! Well, once inside the After, first of all, remember to organize the project a bit, put it at 24 fps, precompose what is needed, name the layers and put colorinchis, so that this does not turn into total chaos. In the precomp of the character, where we have our design, we are going to make a basic rig. We relate the hair and the face to the head, the head to the neck and the neck to the body. The shoulders with the sleeves also to the body. We adjust the anchor points. The bag and the straps are also related to the body, but we can deactivate it for now because we will animate these secondary things at the end. For the legs and arms, we can redo them inside the after with the shape layers. The arms, with a layer of shapes with a narrowed line, would already be there. To make it double curved, we change it inside the stroke property. To join the hand, using the create nulls from paths script, it creates some nulls for us following the path. We erase the ones that we don't need, and we relate the hand to the null of the wrist. So that the hand rotates in the same way, we can then animate it frame by frame without any problem. This arm is related to the shoulder. For the legs we do the same as the arm. For the pants, we are going to duplicate the shape of the leg, change its color, increase its thickness, put the round joint on it, and add the property of clipping paths to match the design. To avoid having to animate two paths at once, we simply take one and parent it to the other. In this way , the proportion of the width of the pants is always well maintained and we can turn the knee much better than if it were with padding. We put it in its place, we related it to the body and... Ready, we would have the character ready to animate. We can deactivate the back arms and legs because we will duplicate them later. Now we can import what we did in the animate, I'm going to do it with the blessed Timelord so you can see how nice it is. Tachaan. We lower the opacity of the references, we deactivate the ones we don't need at the moment, we precompose so we don't have a thousand layers and we start. The first thing we do is move the plant references a bit to have some space behind them since when animating some things with loops we will need to move them out of range. We start as always with the body, which is the most important thing. We sole the body layer. If we don't see a damn, we change the color of the guides or the background, as they want. We put the anchor point below to rotate it well later. We animate the position every two frames, just like we did in the animate. We are squaring it according to the reference. So that it doesn't show on some, the trick is to create an adjustment layer above everything with the time posterization effect at 12 fps. So we no longer have to worry about putting hold keyframes all the time. Now we can animate the rotation a bit, down when the down pose, up when the up pose, and down again in the next down pose. If we don't locate them well, we can quickly create some markers to visualize where each pose is. We can smooth the rotation, and put the loopOut expression on it. This will be the case with many things when we make our characters, so as not to go around putting a thousand keyframes. We can offset it a little to make it more natural. Ok, once we have the body, I would start to make a boot. We animate it with position and rotation. As you can see, the tip goes under the ground. So to shape it, we do it by creating a couple of new path points and we adjust it as we see. Depending on the design it will be easier or we will have to use masks or alpha mattes to get by. Nothing that has no solution. Come on, we do the same with the leg. This process, as you can see, is cool because you don't have to think much about it, we can put on little music or like I do, I put on UFO podcasts, astral projections or consciousness, so they accompany me in madness, or what is the same , we expand our minds a bit, and while we are calmly adapting the keyframes. We fix the defects as we can, in my case there was a gap, so I had to put a false ass to fix it. It's in fashion now I think. Ok, and now instead of doing the whole process again, we duplicate the legs and boots, put them in the back, move the keyframes to the middle and duplicate them. Now everything should fit fine. If we want we can move them a little to one side. Well, more of the same with the arm. It is not necessary to go frame by frame, but by putting the down poses, which are the ones with the greatest amplitude, we can adjust from there. We take into account a little the flexibility of the elbow and the hand and that way it looks more natural, right? We duplicate the same as with the legs. Surely we have to adjust the link with the null, but good. If they're making it this far they won't have much of a problem. I trust in you! Okay, it's getting chachi right? His hands are a little dead but ok. Now we would get with upss!! There is a bug here! Come on, nothing has been seen. Let's go with the details: It depends on each character we will have more or less work. In this case we can animate the rotation of the neck and head a bit. We offset each part a little and it looks more natural. We can animate the hair with the cc bend it. As it is a layer of forms, we have to put the expression of toComp(value) for it to furule, okay? Remember to use the principle of inertia, which I explained to you in the Tutorial on how to animate in AFTER EFFECTS from 0 to 100. Well, and finally the bag, we animate it swinging a little and out of phase with the body. We can animate the strips frame by frame or we can create nulls with this script from the after, and relate them to the bag. I think it's faster that way, and we can still have control of the layouts. Finally, we can do these lines to separate the same colors by creating a duplicate of the leg, create a layer style with a stroke, and tell it to take the matte of the L leg. We adjust what is necessary and go. Pulling. Well, how are you? Have they missed a lot? If you didn't understand something, you can see my basic after and animation tutorials to lay the foundations a bit, but if you want to take this seriously and earn a living as an animator or motion designer, all you have to do is take a look at the new ONLINE MASTER'S DEGREE IN MOTION GRAPHICS WITH AFTER EFFECTS AND CINEMA 4D. (web) The director, Salvador Borrego, has worked with the genius from Bayona making animations for the movie A Monster Comes to See Me, I won't tell you more. With that they know they will be in good hands. And then they are going to leave with a lot of corrected projects under their arms, a lot of contacts thanks to the live classes and most importantly, a reel capable of quickly finding work in a studio or as a freelancer. In my time because they didn't have these things, otherwise I would have signed up without thinking about it. I don't know about you, but I prefer a thousand times to invest my time and money in training myself than in playing roulette with cryptocurrencies, for example. Well, I leave you the link of the master's degree in the description so you can take a look at it and if you are interested, you can consult any questions. Well with what we have learned, we can now dedicate ourselves to animating walks of any character we want, but what happens if we want the character to walk through a background? We can do it in a couple of ways, one is by animating the background and leaving the character in the same place walking, and another is to leave the background I want and move the character's precomposition. Be that as it may, we have to increase the duration. To do this, we can trim the precomp at the start and end, duplicate it a few times, put them one after the other, and precompose it as the full walkcycle. We can make a little mask so it doesn't take up the entire comp. Come on, in this case we are going to make it walk from one side of the screen to the other and another day we will see how to move the background, okay? That in the end I got very involved explaining a thousand things... Here comes the litmus test to make sure your feet don't slip. If we have done the walkcycle well, we already have it almost guaranteed. We create a null and parent it to the character's precomp. We put a guide on the heel in front of the contact pose. Now let's animate the null. We keyframe the position, time-forward to the next contact pose, and move the null until the heel matches the guide again. Remember that this is animated in 2's, so we need to put an adjustment layer on top of it with the time posterized to 12 seconds. In order not to have to do this a thousand times, we put the position in the loopOut expression continue, so it continues to apply the increase in value constantly. The nice thing about null is that we can place the precomp where we want without having to keep an eye on the position keyframes. Well, we animate the background a bit as we want and now yes guys, we can finish our outdoor walkcycle. Uff I'm sweating huh... it's a process that we have to internalize but once we get the hang of it I see a lot of potential, not only for walkcyces but for anything really. As you can see, you can be as creative as you want. I have taken advantage of walkcycles to create a mini post-apocalyptic story where a guy from the future who survives radioactivity and other things as best he can, uses virtual reality to remember what the world was like in the past, free of contamination. Well guys, I hope I have motivated you to create your own characters and put them to work. If you want to see how I did the whole process step by step from the idea to the final result, all you have to do is leave me a comment or join the channel as official Chachofans and I'll do a direct explaining everything more calmly. See you in the next one!
