How To Create Walk Cycles in Blender - The Fastest Method

[Music] today we're going to learn how we can use blender's mirror pose tool to very quickly create a first pass for a walk cycle i've always been a really big proponent of utilizing the tools within a software that can actually help you animate a lot faster and the mirror post tool is one of those tools within blender that can really help you achieve the animation that you need to in a much shorter amount of time and if you've been following my channel in the past or even seen some of my blender courses on sites like digital tutors or pluralsight you know that i've been using blender for quite a while it's actually the first 3d software that i ever used when i was around 13 years old was when i first started using blender back when it had a very old ui and a very difficult user interface to actually get around in but now with blender 3.0 they're constantly updating the software they're making it easier to use and they're just making it a whole lot more powerful which is making it a lot more appealing to animators so i'm really excited to be getting into blender more and having a mix of maya and blender content on my channel so let's just go ahead and jump into our blender scene here and begin working on this walk cycle and what i have here is the lisa blender rig from i animate and this is what we're going to be working with here but you can use really any rig that you like so what i already have set up is just this basic contact pose and we're going to be creating a simple walk cycle starting with this contact pose and a contact pose is really the most important pose to start with when you're creating any type of walk but we're actually going to take this pose and build our entire walk cycle really off this one single pose and utilize things like the mirror pose tool as well as just the animation that blender gives us between key poses to actually build the main poses of our walk so we have our contact pose here and we have 24 frames within our animation that's sort of the basic frame length you would have for a vanilla style walk cycle so since we're starting with our contact pose the next main pose that we need is basically the contact pose for the opposite leg so what we're going to do is just press a on our keyboard to highlight all of the control curves for this character make sure everything is selected and then what we're going to do is go up here to pose we're going to choose copy pose and then we'll go to frame 12 which is the frame where we would want to have the next contact pose now that we have frame 12 highlighted we'll go up here to pose and we'll just choose paste pose flipped so it's basically just going to mirror this pose flip it around and give us the contact pose for the opposite leg and it really is that simple to mirror a pose in blender and this is something i really love about blender is that this is just a built-in tool inside of blender it's not an add-on it's not a plug-in you don't need to download anything extra to use it if you're in something like mai you'd probably need something like animbot or some other plugin to easily mirror a pose just as easy as you can do inside of blender so now that we have this pose mirrored for our contact on the opposite foot what we can do now is just go ahead and make sure we go back to frame 0 and what we can do is just copy this pose again go to frame at 24 and make sure we can actually see that on our timeline here so we'll drag this marker here to expand it go to frame 24 and we'll just go up here to pose and then choose paste so now we have the basic contact poses for our walk cycle and if we play it here you can see the very rough like walk cycle that we're getting we're basically just having a very rough cycle in here of these feet just shuffling back and forth but what we can do is utilize the animation that blender is giving us to begin to build our other main poses for our walk cycle and if we actually open up this reference here this is actually from the animator survival kit and this is just showing the sort of main poses of a walk and we're going to be using this sort of as our reference so we have our down position our passing position and our up position so that's what we need to create inside of blender we can do that really quickly just by utilizing the animation data that blender has already given us so we have our feet sort of shuffling right here so what we need to do is select this control right here and basically we're just going to zero this value out so the feet are planted on the ground at frame three and we can go ahead and start dragging this foot back and i'll go ahead and change the axis to global just so that we can drag it straight back here and for this position we're actually going to grab the other foot and begin to bring it up and rotate it and start lifting it off the ground and for this we want to make sure we select the foot roller control take the rotate x value on that bring it down to zero so that we remove any of that foot roll we can begin to bring that foot back a little bit and we're just really roughly creating a down position here and we'll begin to bring the hips down just a little bit and i might actually grab the left foot drag it forward just a little bit and i'll grab this foot and start to bring it up a little bit more and maybe rotate it down just a bit again we're just very roughly creating this down position and since we already have that contact pose for the next step in there blender's just going to start to blend between these poses and already just by adjusting the down position pose we're starting to get something that looks a bit more like a walk cycle so what we're going to do now is begin to create the passing position so we're gonna go to frame six press a to select everything and then press i on our keyboard to make sure we lock a keyframe down on everything i actually don't know if i did that on frame three so i'm gonna go ahead and just press i on frame three just to make sure we have a keyframe lock down on every control so what i'm going to do here is grab the right foot bring it up and rotate it again we're just creating this passing position here and i'll probably bring this foot forward just a little bit maybe bring the hips up just a little bit more and actually on this down position i might grab this left foot and just bring it forward just a little bit more so we've already very quickly got a rough pose for our passing position now we just need the up position so what we're going to do is scrub forward go to frame 9 press a to select all the controls press i to lock a keyframe down on everything and then we can begin to adjust the up position just a little bit here and since blender is already interpolating between all these key poses it already gets us really close to a decent passing position for this pose what we can do is actually grab the hips maybe bring them up a little bit because if we look back at our reference typically the up position is actually a little bit higher than the contact so that's something we can actually get into this pose and that might be just a little bit too high for that and if you don't know this if you begin to translate a control and just hold shift down it will allow you to basically do very micro adjustment so you're able to really dial this in to exactly where you want as long as you're just holding shift down you can see when we play this we have our very rough first pass on this one step but in order for this to be a full cycle we need to actually have the opposite step here so obviously right now it's just blending between these two contact poses so we need to go in here and create the down passing and up position for the opposite leg and we can do this really fast by utilizing the mirror pose tool in blender so what we're going to do is press a to select everything we'll go to frame three on the down position we'll go up here to pose choose copy pose and then what we'll do is go forward to frame 15 and then just go to pose and we'll choose paste pose flipped so it's basically just going to flip that pose create the mirrored version of that pose and now we have the down position for the opposite leg and then what we'll do is just go to frame six and again making sure we have everything selected by pressing a on our keyboard go up here to pose copy pose and then what we'll do is go over here to frame 18 and then just paste the pose flipped and you can see we have the keyboard shortcuts for ctrl c for copying and then shift ctrl v for pasting but we'll go ahead and just use this drop down menu for now and there we have our passing position and then we'll be done with the step for the opposite leg so we'll copy this pose go over here to frame 21 three frames ahead and we'll just choose paste pose flipped we can go ahead and play this and you can see we very quickly have a base for our walk cycle obviously this is really rough it doesn't really look that great but really we've only spent a few minutes creating this first pass for our walk cycle and then we can go in here and actually begin to fine tune things adjust each individual pose start getting more upper body chest movement in this animation start working on the arms and start working on the up and down as well as the left right and the hips looking at this she's probably moving too much left and right on her hip so that's something we could dial back but you can see by just utilizing the mirror pose tool we really just started with one single pose our contact pose that we had created and we used that contact post along with the mirror tool to create our entire walk cycle really in just a few minutes and we have a really strong foundation that we can begin to work with so this is why i think it's really helpful to make sure that you're utilizing the tools within a software to help you achieve the results that you need a lot faster things like the mirror tool as well as just utilizing the free interpolation that blender gives you while most of the time it doesn't look great obviously transitioning between each contact pose is just the feet sliding but you can use that information to begin to build the other poses that you need and then utilize the mirror tool again to create all the poses you need for the opposite step and what i would typically do for this if i were working on a walk cycle really i would just focus on one step because i have that mirror tool i only need to really make sure that this one step looks perfect exactly how i want i can really go in here and fine tune each individual pose and then when i'm happy with this step i can just copy all of that information flip it over for the opposite leg so i'm really only having to animate one single step and then i can just copy that and flip it over to complete the cycle so now that you have all the main information you need for a walk cycle done in just a few minutes then you can go in here and really start focusing on the poses so what you can do is go to frame three for the down position maybe grab the elbow control add a little bit of drag start getting the chest movement in there start animating the hips a bit more and really start just plusing all of these poses to really begin to flesh out your walk cycle but you're able to get a really strong foundation in there in just a few minutes so hopefully this video was helpful for you and you can begin to use the mirror tool in blender for your own animations [Music] you

Channel: Mark Masters

Views: 172,643

Keywords: animation, how to animate a walk cycle, blender walk cycle, animating a walk cycle, walk cycle, walk cycles in blender, walk cycle tutorial, blender tutorial, blender walk cycle tutorial, how to create walk cycles in blender, blender walk cycles, blender 3d, blender, blendermadeeasy, 3d animation, blender animation, tutorial, blender made easy, 3d, blender 2.9, walk animation, blender animation tutorial, character animation, blender 3.0, walk cycle animation, how to

Id: e_COc0ZVHr0

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022