The COMPLETE Guide to Walk Cycle Animation

as if YouTube needed another W cycle video why should you watch this video I'm going to share the entire workflow I use when I'm doing pre-production or I'm creating walk cycles for a game I've only ever worked on one game but it was some good animation it I'll take you through blocking sping and playing around with things and polishing things up and at the end of it I'll show you a quick way to present it as a play blast so hopefully whether you're a beginner animator or a seasoned animator whether you work in Maya or blender whether you use animbot whether you don't use animbot I'm hoping that people of all skill levels will be able to pick up a few things from this video so I've got Spidey here I've got no keys on him I'm going to get questions about this this is Mya 2024 if you see anything that's like oh that's a bit different than new it's probably because of Mya 20124 now with most of my videos I'm going to be using animbot that's just because I'm so used to using it and it makes my workflow a lot quicker don't necessarily have to use albot most of the tools in alen bot can be found online for free so all I'm going to do is set a key and start with a pose so I kind of want this first Contact pose always start with a contact pose got that Hill kind of stepping down I'm actually going to use these roll controls if I can keep my rotation on the roll controls that's first of all going to help me a lot I'm just doing the rotation on that foot and I'm basically just going to go in and give myself a pose that I can work with that I feel pretty good about this hip is going to be doing this the chest is going to be counter rotating just want the knees kind of following what the legs are doing so I'm just going to go for something vanilla not too crazy the weight is going to be fairly centered over that and we will counter with the arms what the legs are doing we are just doing something vanilla right now we get a good basis which we can then go in and animate to make more what we want I think he's actually a little too stretched out there I'm going to just raise his route a little okay that feels pretty generic to me which is good that's what we want as a first pose I go ahead and just animate these a bit just to make them not so crap in fact I'm just going to go ahead and make this a fist because I don't want to have to deal with fingers okay we got a lovely fist I'm going to quickly Mirror Mirror On animbot Now mirroring is something I'm going to be doing a lot so you want to make sure that you have a good mirroring script anim box is very good works pretty well okay we've got a pose all I'm going to do is go to frame let's say 24 and copy that and then I'm going to quickly make the pose for the other side what do we do well we don't go in and animate this we just grab everything and press mirror disgusting but look we have a pose now and that is kind of the base of our walk cycle so very quickly we've got our first three poses which are kind of the building blocks and I'd say the most important things to have in there as all cycle brilliant and then in between these let's have a look at the old Richard Williams thing again so we've got contact we've got contact we've got contact we now want to put in the Downs the ups and the passing positions so with that in mind let's go ahead and create a passing position cuz that's kind of directly in between both of the keys going to make this on frame zero just for Math's sake so directly in the middle is frame six there we go we got a passing position so some simple things the roll let's just make that zero refer to Richard Williams yep kind of want that knee leading so put the Roll To Zero it's got kind of fun foot toer just add a little appeal in there and if he going to be slightly up delay These Arms back a little just get a little bit of exaggeration in there already little overlap okay I'm not going to worry too much about making sure everything is absolutely perfect right now I'm going to make sure that the weight is on this foot and I'm going to animate the hips not the center of gravity I going animate both want to keep that head kind of stable as with most animation head is where you're kind of looking well the head is where you're looking not kind of get this knee a bit nicer go out a little bit not going to go super crazy with these inet just going to get something in there okay so that is our in between players and guess what we're going to do now copy that cuz this is the same but the other way amazing so very quickly we've got five poses now we're going to go in and make the downs and the UPS I'm really at this point focusing mostly on the feet and the center of mass root control has many different names whatever you want to call it but if I just in between this now doing a straight tween it should mathematically give me pretty perfect foot placements I mean I'm not worrying about that much anyway but it's just good to know that if I'm doing a tween machine that's 50% it is actually putting things in the right place so we want the down here and again I'm not worrying too much about being perfect on the down we want this back foot still contacting slightly so I'm going to just kind of put it there and do one of these I'm not worrying too much about where this is in place what I'm worrying about is the angle of the leg and we can adjust it slightly when we go into splining it so we want to be getting that weight over a bit more just a little overlap in the arm there I don't want him too overlapping I want this quite a solid W cycle I can already see that this arm is not going forward enough so I'm just going to slightly blend that to the next frame happy enough with that and now let's create the up same again 50% in between using what we already have let's go up maybe a bit too much or maybe not enough who knows not me I don't want that weight coming over too quickly so I'm just going to keep him over there a bit now on the up you are starting to push off I guess with that back foot you can see got that nice angle in there which is kind of what T machine gave us just make sure we're I mean the TW machine was pretty bang on but let's just make sure it's exactly what we want so I want this fairly straight but not 100% straight I don't like to use stretch too much on the limbs especially at this point because then something will be out of whack probably get this resolving a little more so you can see that we have a walk cycle you can already see or maybe guess what I'm about to do but I do the mirroring of these parts because it helps me to visualize that things are moving in the right way but at this point I can basically delete these two and grab these do a copy and then literally paste so we have the same thing happening twice I'll grab the and hit mirror which should give me a walk cycle now I'm going to go in and hit pre and post Infinity Cycle here in the graph edor now he should just walk forever now the arms are not great they're not feeling great but he is kind of feeling like he's doing a walk it's a quick blocking to then go in and do the real work which happens the real work the bulk of my walk cycle work which happens in the graph editor now I don't use the editor usually much when I'm animating but for walk cycles and any kind of cycle I do massively with a walk cycle it makes sense because it's such a mathematical systematic approach to a walk cycle if you put things on the right frames things just kind of work and fit into place and you can just mirror them so therefore using the greda which I tend to like to stay away from because I don't like to be too mathematical using the spaghetti box to do my animation I like to do things visually I mean it's about the poses for sure but it's more about the feel of the M cycle so I'm happy to offset things I'm happy to adjust my timing in a very detailed way which will affect the walk cycle massively because all walk Cycles are essentially just these keys right so what makes them different it's very subtle small changes so I'll literally just go in at this point and hit autot tangent and we should have a walk cycle or the startings the bases of a walk cycle at this point I'm actually going to put the walk cycle on a linear path as well and this is something that I don't think a lot of people do but they probably should so I'll just grab a global control for example and put that on a layer I like to do this on a layer for a reason that will become obvious I'm actually going to do this from frame 3 to six between one of our keys and I'm just going to move that forward and just match that position which I think is that's pretty much it and create an constant Infinity Cycle and then I just want to make sure that this is matched 100% perfectly which I think it is so now this is going to put my walk cycle not on a treadmill it's going to take it off of a treadmill and have it walk through space so having it on a layer means I can very quickly just mute that and it's on a spot so being able to just switch between those whenever I want is so unbelievably helpful when you're locking things down because like I said it this stuff is complicated and this way just kind of simplifies it I don't have to think okay when I put it to moving through space this is going to translate in this way I can just see it I can just turn that off and how is that working how's the spacing working in here how's the spacing working in here I'll work with that on and off just on a little switch like that and it's super helpful let's get into animating this walk cycle so just want a little more hang time maybe in here so the foot doesn't move in this way this is like the trajectory of the hill of the w CLE so you can see it kind of comes back up and then down quite quickly finish on an up before we then land you're essentially getting through here a down this is down and then we have an up before we then hit but it doesn't really make sense in the graph Ed because I've got multiple things happening in terms of the foot roll and the rotation okay so I'm just going to have this neutral pretty much through here doesn't matter if there's a little heel roll in there doesn't oh there's a foot angle okay we'll animate the foot angle so I'm actually going to delete any of this so I'm going to animate the roll this should be back here and I now want this to be flat okay so this makes more sense to my brain now quick little redo there I'm not even worrying about the other foot I'm just going to do it for this foot because you can probably guess what we're going to do we're going to mirror it just to be clear okay so that's interpolating a bit nicer now now I'm not solely sticking to the grapher especially with the feet because they can get very complex and you can get yourself in a bit of a mess I think I know mostly what I want visually so I'm just going to kind of put it there want a little up before down now I like to do things bit more Snappy than this and just hit that final pose a bit sooner so we can get that nice Arc it kind of snapping forward a bit there chill don't love let's try a little little overlap now things might look fine in the graph but sometimes you do just need to put things there just to make sure that spacing is fine so don't rely on the graphed if be your spacing going to do a quick pass of the the translate X we going out I think swinging round and in for a masculine walk cycle and then here I really just want to be planted in that final position as soon as I land so probably from here and we can just delete keys I'm not worried about having keys on everything like I would be with knocking for an acting shot there's a little pop forward here where I'd make the contact I think that's probably just a bit too much got be very careful with your spacing in a walk cycle see how there's a big pop forward there in the knee so let's just try and fix that I'm just watching the knee spacing and trying to fix that it seems like oh why am I doing this kind of polishyellow get a bit more of a bouncing ball feel through that walk probably add a bit more I like to just come in and scale some things sometimes I love using this tool I reckon we can come down a bit maybe a little up we just add a little more up and down all this does it just scales from the bottom or the top point I use this all the time it's really useful okay so we use that as a base for the hips and in fact what you can even do is just have just this it's the same thing bit cleaner so as we take the weight on this foot we want to be shifting our weight I don't want to be doing it yet still keep that over the other side as much as I can same with here similar to any kind of Animation really you want to be favoring poses it's kind of impossible to see what this translat Zed is doing while he's moving through space so I'm just going to mute it and I just want a little bit of kind of lead on that hips so we get a little forward here which is the opposite of what's Happening we just sink back and then come forward and then as we come through we probably want to be going back as we are in this just starting to drive forward so we're on a 12 frame cycle here so we can literally just delete that should work for both ends don't quite like how favored that is to one side I want this to be very subtle and not too thrusty okay so we have all of our translates done we move over to the rotations probably a good idea to start with the X get a little overlap in here as the Translate Y comes down we overlap that so the transl L wire starts coming down here probably a bit too much so we'll go to there and in fact we will just instead of doing all of that we'll move these one frame later decide the point when we want to start transitioning from that rotation down to rotation up there we go easy as that much easier to just delete half of it and just focus on one bit really keeps things clean and as long as this 1 to 13 adds up to 12 frames it's the same as doing 0 to 12 it's the same as doing 2 to 14 so it's just cleaner to do it that way rather than having to come in here and then add another key here it's less work to just move it right and it becomes a bit cleaner it's less keys to manage feel like he's not moving quite enough maybe let's try scaling this and this is kind of what I'm doing when I'm going in and I'm adding the things that make it my walk cycle rather than a vanilla walk cycle you know you're coming in and you're scaling Keys you're adjusting the timing say you want this to be a bit more direct with his hip movements Maybe we just move some things so there it's a bit more po to posy and you're just going to get a different feel on that but I want it quite generic I want it quite vanilla right now I can go in and change those things later so we'll stick with that and we just finally go into the rotate Zed so as the weight comes down we want to be picking that up and we've animated this foot so I know when the weight hits which is here so I think it's working kind of well maybe a bit sooner it could just pick up that weight okay it's feeling a bit safy right now so I just want to tone that down see how that feels let go from like four to2 okay and then sometimes when I do that I'm like did I just make it worse so I like to just amp it up way up and see what that does maybe I did make it worse cuz I kind of like this but that's the kind of the great thing about working this way you can just play with things you know you can go how much do I want that moving rather than having to go in and adjust a bunch of keys and just scale a whole curve maybe too sassy for Spider-Man we'll come down a little bit do kind of want things matching in both sides if you don't then you're kind of going to get one side feeling bu and you'll notice that over the course of the cycle so as much as you can keep things kind of working in a mirrored way it's going to feel less cyly if that makes sense like if you can spot something for example watch that and then watch that you can tell that it's a cycle because doing that move is such an unnatural thing that you can just tell you're cycling from one point to the other like that part of the cycle sticks out so it reads as a cycle the more you can keep it generic and not have things stick out like doing a little arm with in the cycle the better it will be of course if you want to do a 200 frame cycle and maybe there's a bit of a head turn in there or something that can be a really nice way to make it feel less like a cycle but if you're doing a 24 frame cycle for example and within that you have something like a big head move then it's going to feel more like a cycle okay so I focused a little on the foot and then I focused a little on the route I'm going to connect that to the chest now and it's basically just a similar thing so we kind of need to be Central here and then to the overlap over this side which matches this one I can already feel this one's going to have to come back just cuz I don't want too too much overlap so we want to get more neutral here hope this makes sense I'm kind of just trying to talk my thoughts through as I do it which isn't the easiest thing to do we come through we want to get in the center here and then overlap okay now we're cycling now we're in let's just clean these up and see if that helps I think it could I'm also not sure okay that does feel a little cleaner think we'll leave it as that for now and I'm also noticing that I'm not getting enough swing in that torso like we do with the hip so I'm just going to scale everything see how that works for us it's feeling very linear so I'm actually going to come in and just favor things a little more yeah that'll feel nicer okay that's feeling better for sure going to come in and do this and I just love rotate X I feel like it's so easy it's just overlapping and you can also delete half of it which is super nice makes it so much easier you're just managing literally Four Keys plus any eases you want to put in there I me it don't even have to be four right you could literally just do this and you have a working curve you have the same information in there almost and it's even cleaner I love rotate X okay there's almost no animation in here which is interesting so I'm just going to grab stuff okay so that's almost definitely not what we want I want down happening here a couple of frames after the down of the hips think about here okay that might actually work maybe it's too much right now just lower that and you know what if you're not sure if things are really working just scale it up loads you can kind of see what the motion is then a bit easier so I actually feel like I want to be leading that up a little bit sooner and maybe delaying that down as well so doing one of these so you get that bounce tangent a bit in the middle as we come down okay it's a little upright make him a bit more bent over I love rotate X okay so you can see things are getting a bit nicer now I'm going to come back in and fix these feet because if I change the feet and I decide that I want to then change the body that's all going to affect that other stuff do a quick pass on the feet do a quick pass on the middle you're kind of working on them together and then I'm going to lock down those feet and then I can do those final arms and head stuff so come in here and just do that this might seem too polishyellow and scale things and adjust things and things should work fairly nicely I think in a problem with the whole leg pose with the heel which is wrong and if you find yourself trying like oh I just want to fix the stretch in that one pose like I'm doing here it feels like it pops you see that knee so maybe the issue is actually the hips and they're just coming forward or up a bit too much we could try adjusting the entire curve down cuz you can see it when we play this through as well there was a big spacing issue which you you don't feel as much when you go forward in space but that's why it's useful to have both because if I can feel a spacing issue through here I'm probably going to feel it in the other way and if you can fix it without doing any squash and stretch in the leg then you're in a great place wherever these lines of the leg get stuck in place like there where you kind of know something has gone wrong I also don't want it bending yeah that's probably more what I want there's a little weird knee movement in there actually and I probably should have taken a closer look at that before but is what it is now I do feel like this whole walk cycle is a little bit too far back in the be so I am going to just move everything forward and just for my own visualization it's easier to move both at the same time just forward I'm happy with the back position I think this is too far forward let's go here see what happens like I'm saying see what happens a lot what I'm missing is a little hold at the front maybe I can just delay this spy frame all right let's see how that is looking I'm going to delete all of my keys on the back leg and just copy these really mirror them and offset 12 and now we have threee animation on that back leg still a slight spacing issue but by keeping things symmetrical when we mirror them in terms of the amount that things are rotating and things are translating on each step means that we can just mirror that and get something which is feeling pretty good all right quick pass on the arms it shouldn't take too long it's the same sort of thing right now this is what I call the oh no I'm actually animation stage and that's okay I've been here before many times stupid rig okay it's reading a bit better all right let's go into the lower arm a little bit overlapping see if we can just tighten that up a little at the back end we got some arm animation okay copy offset and to finish off we'll do a little head motion and because it's rotate X and we love rotate X going to go ahead and delete half of it a little bit of rotation in the head just a little overlap and do so in the neck as well we can go in and add finger animation his curves are pretty clean we can just go in and scale some things and adjust things pretty quick to make it what we want just going to interrupt here for a second with a little plug from my website key frame coach a key frame coach you can purchase a review from me send me a syn sketch link and I'll get back to you within a couple of days with a review of your work check out keyframe coach.com let's get back to walk cycling shall we I want to look at how we can push this to just make it a little better cuz it's not quite it's it works it's it does its job as a generic walk cycle but I think there's some things we can push and some things we can improve after all I only set this up as a 24 frame walk cycle I didn't do any kind of timing pass which we would obviously want to do if we were making something that is a bit more spoke why don't we just have a little scale okay he feels a little more purposeful but maybe a bit too much much so maybe it's not a timing of the entire thing that I want to change and it seems a little overwhelming because I've scaled things i' have played with things but actually just small parts of the animation maybe need to be timed differently to have a big effect so let's have a look at the legs it takes a while to peel off I think this could probably be faster through here through here probably easing a bit too much so one two let's take out two and then we'll scale those back because the curves look quite clean I don't mind scaling like this cuz it will be fairly easy to clean up in the graph edor doing things so that you snap to the key poses which is essentially little just be a little clearer and a little more fun okay now let's try and add a little more of that bounce through the walk cycle get up a bit sooner I think maybe adding some more Arc stuff to this we're not just holding this whole pose we're actually kind of coming through and doing a bit of a swing around this is the fun stuff in the walk cycle now we've got parel that technical rubbage we can have some fun feeling funner already and another nice thing to add might be a little bit of Bank in this but as we get through here we just want to start banking that's nice it's creating some nice overlap all right I think he's already feeling a lot better just with that one foot I'll go ahead and put it on the other foot as well I love the way you select keys in my 2024 it's really nice cycle all right let's try and get this chest not feeling so pedestrian shall we I think possibly what it is is just feels too connected to the bottom let's try offsetting this slightly I want a lead though so maybe it's just one frame all it needs and it might just be too Snappy so try easing that back a little just cuz it's cartoony or pushed doesn't mean we don't want to have nice spacing that feels a bit nicer to me let's try scaling it yeah see scaling it up makes me I think we definitely need to scale it down from its original so let's just scale it down by like a third I think that feels kind of nice it's more what I want I'm just going to counter this cuz I feel like the head is going a little crazy so I want to get some rotate X in there ideally see I play one through and then the second one feels too much so I kind of know that I've made the right decision there and that's feeling a bit nicer and this head is now feeling a little bit too secondary so let's try bring that forward one frame okay feeling good so we need to tweak the arms a bit and definitely fix the spacing on the legs okay so with the arms I was having a big issue with the FK setup because the translate was correct but the rotate was following the chest which I didn't want because it meant I was counter animating a lot in the gra Which is shft far too much work so to make things make more sense I'm just going to use a temp control in animbot and you could do this in more manual ways for sure I want to to essentially make this into a worldall space control because I'm not worried about changing the translation I'm not going to be changing that that's just going to inherit what I'm already happy with but I do want to change the rotation so you can see where it hasn't cycled it's baked that rotation and then at the end you can see what that control is doing it's actually just locked a control in World space so I should be able to one for one animate this in the graph editor where if I set a sensible rotation order such as this so that my channels make sense I should be able to fix this up animate it in World space I can actually probably just delete this and delete anything after 24 to have a perfect cycle and now I can animate the FK in World space and without having to counter animate too much now this worklow is super powerful because I can just bake this back clear and bake and I'm back to the standard FK that I have so what I want to do first is just fix this clavicle control a little just to make that feel a bit less slopy cuz if I fix the FK and then fix the clavicle afterwards it might affect some things okay I feel better about that we now have our information that we wanted in World Bas we can go into the graph editor and adjust things and make things lovely so you can see how linear this all feels because things are making sense in the graph editor we can just kind of come in snap things up quite a lot see how that kind of feels for us I'm going to come in and I'm going to grab these scale them up I want it to feel much more pushed than it was like he's walking with a real purpose so it's a bit more cartoony and so that we probably get further forward a lot sooner I think I want him forward even sooner definitely feeling more ped but I want this kind of effect where as it goes down you get more overlap maybe we can just push that bit Yeah and maybe if I just push that even well all right we're getting the basis of kind of what I was wanting and we'll just clean up the rest so so if his arm is back there probably needs to be a bit out honestly I just want to get rid of low of this let's just keep it very simple just go ahead and delete all of this it's getting too complicated this feels simpler already and now I can just go in and add the things that I actually want in there so maybe a little overlap through here as it comes back to like there and then as it comes through obviously we want to go around a little then I like that the arm is moving forward quite quickly but then the rotation is kind of happening a bit later Al way around to here so you get that kind of like fast but then this rotation is kind of happening a bit slower feel nice not everything should have the same kind of spacing it's okay to have a few things feel a bit more linear than others and then that needs to quickly go outside and around let me do this B that okay that feels nice and simple which is good simple is very good an animation simpler the better it feels good from the side I'm happy with that from the front it's feeling better I just don't like something in the rotate X it's probably the scale of this is just too much okay that's feeling a bit more like what I wanted I'm pretty happy with that now if I fix the lower arm it work pretty nicely so I'm going to push this a ton to be nice and kind of overlapping too much it's just this is feeling a bit linear I think maybe I can turn this down a bit and still have the same feel I think by this point a ky needs to be in its final position and then maybe when we do the drop it needs to jump up to through here we want like an acceleration so we get to here maybe maybe a bit sooner something like this boom there I just want a bit more overlap I think yes let me get to the final position hold I think in here we want to be mostly back yeah so I want to get back and then as it starts coming forward I want a nice big overlap I think so to here it's pretty linear we get another key in here just to hold things steady and then there we want a nice extension really it's really different to work this way compared to my usual workflow of Animation but I kind of like this way of being very iterative with the walk cycle okay I think the Rhythm is a little weird right now needs to maybe hold a bit before we come back so fast so maybe I just want to delay the way that comes back I just want a little more rotation that way and I'm going to select a different rotation order y z x is good see I don't mind not making the perfect decision right away because it is quite easy to just fix you see I would like some rotation in this Z here I'm not feeling it right there it comes more like this yeah that's what I want and you might think how what am I thinking of here when I'm just moving these curves about like I'm thinking about this pose and the pose was here and I didn't like that very much I feel like I want the arm to cross over the body a bit so I'm just going to kind of push this until I've reached the most extreme point that I wanted or I think I want and then find the point where it should be at its most extreme which is maybe actually here hopefully that makes sense graph editor can be a very daunting thing but it's your friend you can tame it you just need it to make sense this makes sense to me I've changed the rotation order so that I can just adjust this one thing that I wanted to do now I just go to this Frame I'm like no I don't know how that pose is working so I'm just going to again tweak it and what if we just push this the keys are already there so we can go bake Keys temp control panel clear and bake we literally grab the arm there are all those keys to that offset by 12 something which could be cool is just to grab these Keys maybe have them a bit more upright so we got a very proud Spider-Man see just adjusting those curves just makes him feel totally different just pushing that pose makes things a lot more kind of jolly and he's now a upbeat Spider-Man wonder if we can push things a lot now let's try getting this back go really upright we really get that line of action for through his body I also wonder if we don't want to be so bent with his legs here so maybe we can get that a bit further forward through this point just so we don't bend quite as much cuz it would be nice to have that nice stength feels pretty fun I just want to see what it looks like when it's walking through space I'd rather favor that last pose rather than have this kind of awkward in between pose where this was feeling just a little like awkward and flat by this point I feel like that would kind of be up no okay it's kind of easier to track the spacing when it's moving on the spot just to make sure everything's working nicely cuz you get away with things when it's moving through space okay I wonder if we can maybe just keep this pushed forward here and not go back so fast and then maybe this would feel nice yeah we're getting some nice hanging there now there is a little pot there which we need to fix okay I wonder if we can just play with that heel a bit more so it doesn't come up and Float so much I feel like it's kind of flopping a bit too much and having a bit too much overlap so we just need to maybe tighten that up a bit maybe when it gets through to maybe here it's good to have just a little bit more drag and then by here it needs to be favoring the next Tre a bit more and we can maybe overlap the last toe yeah like that that feels nice quite happy with that okay there's some issues going on with the back now I wonder if it's not going back far enough let's have a play with that and just see so again grab this grab the bottom just kind of scale the entire thing okay might be working better now I did need to clean up a few bits through here didn't I because I scal that this is completely stuck see how this SP is just not moving it's always something to avoid so let's be very gentle with that hose so I wonder if just a slight nudge somewhere here I look at the spacing of the knee here it kind of goes forward hits a point here and then flicks forward so let's try get that I don't want to use this two too much but I also don't want to knee popping kind of a little bit of a catch 22 but you do what you can I want this spacing through here where it's fast to be Progressive and then ease in so it doesn't just feel linear so I think this is rolling up a bit too fast just delay that just a touch Hill feels like it might be popping forward a little quick how does that feel going through space now there might be a little pop in the spacing of that knee as we come forward we're just completely stuck we had a little crash but we're back I think we need maybe a little more up down honestly looking at it because we almost want to bounce into that next step so let me see if I can add something I'm just not feeling that pop up that this step is kind of wanting it to do maybe stay back a little here think down yeah maybe have a fast down and then a little settle at the bottom just to feel a little more weight down there okay that's feeling much nicer on that back F only thing is I really don't like that it goes forward back forward this and all of this up to probably so I want to maintain my spacing up to here I want all of this to be further forward so we're not there we're all here with that poish that's ni cu the geometry skinning you see how it kind of sing back a bit there it's feeling a bit weird so we actually want to just correct that just put it there as we come through here we want to be further forward with host and then we want to drop back I believe through here probably want to be bit further forward just want to make him balanced as he's walking so it feels nice through here this feels a little off balance but I kind of like that and then sort of shoots forward to regain that balance so as we're up here we sort of lose the balance that we had in the air and then through here we're transitioning forward all right so he's just getting on his heel a little earlier in my animation now I just want to see quickly if we can amp up the back pose of this arm swinging back just feels a little little bit not pushed enough right now will this mess up everything yeah I kind of like that we'll stick with that let me do the old mirror after deleting this of course mirror and now I'm going to do delete this mirror see if things are working fingers crossed things are working all right something's broken he animation all right those arms are moving a lot now and of also not moving in so let's make that ay ay all right we've added quite a lot of extra to him I wonder looking at this if we can be a bit further back with this pose just doesn't feel as extended as I want it to be so let me grab these and literally I actually don't really want to change the forward at all cuz I'm really happy with that so I think I will just grab everything before this point and move that instead I'm like we'll go to the most extreme Point let me just try a mirror table okay let me now try that okay we have it working just needed to run a mirror table on animbot I don't know why that broke but it did they move together now we can offset all of these a bunch and there we go we have a very happy Spider-Man or very confident rather than happy I do want to go in and fix the head cuz it's got something going on so I don't have a world space option for this head I don't think so I am therefore going to do what I did before give me a little save put the head into World space and we can just go in and clean up the rotations now we're going to do the same trick as before where we bounce up into that maybe we'll drag him one the frame I don't want it to be too broken but I do want a little overlapping then let's try overlapping that frame maybe even two oh he's so sassy clean up this mess honestly I want this to just stay in the middle so why don't I just delete everything that's kind of what I want it feels kind of confident let's bake that down clear and bake I think it's just maybe overlapping a bit too much needs to be more about the neck rather than the head I think so stupid just wondering why one side is popping on the leg is there a stray thing in here no it seems okay AR bizar Co oh that's what the issue was okay fixing the wrong thing with the wrong thing once again hey delete grab these miror grab cycle cycle offset 12 frames yay that's kind of what I wanted all right so now that things actually started falling into place and I worked out what that slight issue was we pretty much got a finished animation of spider man doing a confident walk that's how I would push that a bit further just to make it less generic you could grab some reference and try and match the timing and how things are moving to that which is often what I will do I'll have a more generic cycle with all of the passing positions up downs and stuff and then it's just in case of adjusting the timing of those adjusting the scale of those things essentially the posing so how far a foot moves up down forward back side how angled it is at certain points the same with all parts of the body there's so much you can change in a walk cycle to make it unique to make it fun to make it fit your character better so hopefully that's a good insight into how to do that from just a generic walk cycle okay so I've got my finished walk cycle here and I just want to talk about presenting this quickly so you could probably just play blast this and people would get in the gist but in a production environment it is useful to have a bunch of different orog graphic views from the front side back up down whatever you want whatever might be necessary for your production so I'll just go through a fun way of setting that up using just one rig and play blasting out one view is to be honest a massive game Cher for cycles first of all we want to create a camera I'm going to go to view create camera from View and this is going to give me my helpfully named perspective 3 and I'll just select that and I call it CLE can so by default when you create your camera it will have a focal length of 35 now this is fine and if you wanted to you can even increase that focal length to make things a bit blatter but there's another way you can do things which is by pressing alt p on your keyboard which then means that you get no perspective change when you move your camera around versus if I press alt P again you can see that there's a bit of a shift going in the perspective as we move around which when you're presenting a walk cycle you aren't going to want which I think will become more obvious once I duplicate these meshes so I'll press alt B again and we have an orthographic camera orthographic is the same as when you go in here and select these kind of orthographic views on side so what I want to do is bring up my outliner and I want to grab all of the geometry which for this rig is this ge root node and I want to go to edit duplicate special option box and in here I want to instance the geometry create a new group Under World and create three copies you can create more or less for however many you want and I am going to just hit apply now what this has done is created three instances of this Spider-Man geometry so I can move that to where I would like it add some rotation values make this minus 90 so we have a front view do the same for this side and add a three quarters View and this literally just instances the geometry and we have multiple views in the same viewport with just one rig and what's really interesting about this is you can actually grab your controls so let me show you with this FK control and if you move the geometry on that it actually updates for the rest so you don't even necessarily have to do this every time you make a change on the animation and you can even edit things at the same time as having all threee views which I quite often do so rather than having all different cameras set up and having them all in the viewport you can just instance geometry and have this to the side and work on a cycle all at the same time does get a bit confusing sometimes because you think that you're looking at this one and then you want to edit this one but you have to edit this one to change this one but if you can get around that then it's very interesting way of working for sure one other thing I also like to add this last geometry not that I period is it also works as scale so I like to come in and add just one more Spider-Man and then I'll come in and do a similar thing to what I did with that layer which is just match the foot position over a few frames set that to Infinity Cycle and linear give you that and now we just frame this up and move things closer or further apart but we have four different views of Spider-Man here for director or your mate to judge and get some feedback on this is a great way of displaying your cycles and we can hit play blast on this and just like that we've got a lovely presentation of our cycle with just one rig in one scene one camera no compositing to do and yeah highly recommend this way of working you can risk it and keep it in your scene it can be very buggy working this way and it can kind of ruin your geometry so either keep it in your scene and be comfortable with having to transfer your animation to a different rig or just to leave it when you're done and then redo the process I quite like to create locators at all of the points where I put these geometries and then just quickly duplicate the mesh and parent them to the locators so that I don't have to reposition them every time but now I'll just delete those and save my scene so that's the walk cycle I really hope it helps feel free to drop a like share this video around with your animation friends subscribe to the channel leave a comment comment below with any of your feedback anything you'd like to see in future videos and check out keyframe coach.com or animation reviews but until next time thanks a lot for watching I really appreciate you guys and see you next time bye oh so bad [Music]

Channel: owenferny

Views: 8,459

Keywords: animation, owen fern, owenferny, how to animate, body mechanics animation, character animation, maya animation, maya, animation tutorial, maya tutorial, body mechanics, blender, blender animation, 3d animation tutorial, blender tutorial, walk cycle, how to walk cycle, maya walk cycle, blender walk, 3d walk cycle, ue5 walk cycle, walk cycle workflow, maya 2024 walk cycle, maya 2024, animation cycle, cycle, walk cycle breakdown, 3d workflow, how to animate walking

Id: tpZfDPEz68M

Length: 43min 55sec (2635 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024