We're going to make a standard 24 frame
walk cycle. The first thing I do is go to the output properties and make sure the
frame rate is 24 FPS then we can adjust the timeline so it ends on 24 frames and
I'll just use the mouse wheel to zoom in a little bit here like so and then drag
this bar to get this highlighted portion into the center of this panel. Now you
can see I've already added a few markers at the bottom like C1 D1 etc and you can
add these markers using this menu so M to add marker and Control + M to rename
them. So these will be my poses so this is contact and every three frames I'll
use the arrow keys here to go over some one two three I have a new marker so one
two three new marker and so on so forth the interesting point here is at the end
on this marker I'll do one two and three and you'll see that this last one is
outside of our range so this is kind of important to get this thing to loop
properly let's go to the animation tab I'm going to switch things around a
little so I'm going to set this to be the graph editor I will set this to be
the dope sheet this can remain the viewport and I'm just going to drag this
to the side so it's as small as possible because we don't really need this bit
now let's go to the action editor in the dopesheet alright, you select the dope sheet
with this button and then you select the actions editor from within the dope
sheet using the second drop-down so action editor and then use the mouse
wheel to scroll to this bit here and then select new and this will be the
name of our new animation so we are just going to call it WalkCycle. Yeah, let's put a number at the end and then I will click here to
make sure that this walk cycle gets saved when you close blender so it's
kind of important click on this. Back in the Layout panel I'm going to go into
pose mode and then I'm going to turn off all of these layers okay and I'm just
going to select the ones that we're actually going to use that would be
torso the FK arms and the IK legs and we don't really need the root now let
me just close everything here rig layers to the top rig main properties right
underneath now I'm going to open this transform panel here and I'm going to
select some of these controls like like the foot IK control over here and I'm
going to make sure that this value is XYZ Euler rigify will have this standard
to quaternion W X Y Z but we're going to use the graph editor mostly to
make our animation and quaternions are difficult to understand when looking at a
graph, so we want to set this to the Euler and similarly I have set all of
these controls that we're going to use to Euler that'll just make it easier to
meet the make our animation so you got it you have to do this I've already done
this for for all these controls now I can right click on this first frame for
our animation and turn on recording by clicking on this little button here now
I can go into orthographic view with the 5 key then one to get the forward view I'm
just going to adjust the feet a little bit better but now when he's in a
standing A-pose the feet will be quite far apart when you're walking the feet are
much closer together much closer to this center line here so for male characters
the feet will be kind of close to this line for female characters they
might be right on the line overlapping it a little bit so the first thing we do
is click on this control then G lock on the x-axis by pressing the X key and
then just drag it into place a little like so and then I'm going to rotate it
with the R key lock it to the z axis and then rotate it like so and maybe
move it even closer to centerline now you'll need to experiment with this for
what looks good enough now I can do control C copy it and then shift ctrl V
to get the other side so now our feet are positioned somewhat
like we want them to be. With this control still selected I'm going to go into side
view and then I will just move it forward G walk it to the y-axis and then
I'm going to move forward about here I think, just about there and then move
this back to be about over there now the feet will lift off the ground
obviously but that's ok the reason we're doing this so you have some idea will
please see the torso control so first of all I'm just going to move this rotate
this into position like so right straighten out the foot a little and
then I can drag this towards the control down by locking it to z axis until I get
a little bend in the leg all right so this is stretched too much and right
about there should be okay maybe a little bit more now I can just rotate
this into position as well so I get a bent leg like so okay let me just turn off this transform
panel and you want to have these two things expanded most of the time okay so
now I'm going to select the these two controls and then these two controls and
I will do ctrl C to copy it alright the cursor needs to be in the
viewport for this to work and then I'll get the cursor over here to this
last marker that is outside of our range and okay I'm going to right click on it
to put the cursor over here and then with the mouse cursor back in the
viewport I will do ctrl V to paste it alright so we copied this when the
cursor was over here and then we pasted it over here and you'll see this bar
that means that both of these keys are duplicates. Nothing is changed, which
is usually a bad thing in animation that's okay now we're going to put the
cursor over here right click on c2 so that's the second contact position and
over here I will do shift control V and that'll paste a flipped pose so what
that means is that you start out over here with this foot forward that foot
back but as we move forward in the timeline by the time you get to the
second contact position the feet have flipped and then moving on again the feet will flip
again so if I press the spacebar I can see this initial animation happening
so I'm just going to stop this go back to the first frame. Go to the sideview, now
we're going to work on the torso control. The positioning of the feet
is really just so we can have a better understanding of where we want this
thing to be. So first of all when you're moving you're slightly bent forward so
I'm just going to press R to rotate this and give it a slight forward bent. Okay
not not too much just a little bit and we've already moved it down a little bit
now we can select the pelvis control and I'm going to rotate this and lock it to
the z axis and then I'm going to move it so that the forward, it's positioned more
towards the forward leg okay so let's see this from the front right so
here's where the leg joins the pelvis and you can see that the
socket is now more forward than it used to be and similarly the socket for this
leg is towards the back now so that's one of the changes that we make to the
pelvis the second one is that we will rotate it slightly to the side so it's
bent one side like so and you can see that the belt line is now moved so it's
kind of dipping that way and we rotated it like this so this bit is a little bit
forward and that's a little bit back ok so back to the side view and now we can
select both the pelvis and the torso so I'm just going to shift click on this
and then do ctrl C to copy it so the first contact pose take it to the end or
the last contact pose and then control V so we have a duplicate first and
the last then in the middle we can do shift control V to paste the flipped
version of it. Now what that gives us is a movement on the pelvis and to directions
we are twisting it so what it favors one leg forward but we're also dipping to
one side so the belt line will move as the character is walking so I'm
just going to stop this back to the first contact pose and to the side okay
I'm going to select this heel control and if I drag on the time line you'll
see it starts going back like so but what I want to do is I'm going to select
this frame so this will be our down position so this is the contact and then
the down so I'm going to do Alt + R to remove the rotation on this so it's flat
on the ground and if I move it further along the timeline
you'll see it does something strange it goes right back up because in this
contact position is supposed to be up so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go
to the up position and remove the rotation so here as well so from the
down through the passing position to the up it'll stay down so right so contact
it's up then on the down it's on the floor and then it stays on the floor to
the up position and then back to the contact position it goes like so same
for the other foot so go back here for this one we wanted to .. right it'll be on
this contact position then on down it'll be on the ground and then if I
put another .. if I remove the rotation on the up position for this. It'll stay down
for the entire duration from contact position to the up and then it'll move
back to the contact position and back up like so. So it's basically the same
thing that we did for this control but it's on the second half of the animation
okay so in the down position so I'm just going to select this frame here so that
will be 4 I want to push this further down so we will grab it lock to the z-axis
and then bring it further down right so the heavier this character is you really
want to see you this feel this impact on the ground like so and then I'm just
going to ignore the pass position this is the up position and this is the
final contact pose now the up position needs to be higher than the than the
contact position so I'm just going to make a visual reference here, so this
point is about over here so in the up position that point needs to be higher
than that and that's not the only consideration you also want to take a
look at how how the leg is bent. Well that'll kind of be informed by who your
character is and what conditions he is walking in but that's for another
day right now I just want this point to be higher than it is in this
location and then I can just copy these over so I'm just going to copy this put
this over there and then I'm going to copy this and put this on the second up
position right so contact down passing position up back to contact and then the
same thing repeats again you have another down another passing position
another up and the second contact so if you play this you can see it's kind of
walking although really badly but we can improve that so I'm just going to stop
this back to the first one now let's go to the animation tab I'm going to drag
this window up like so and maybe move it a bit over here like that go into
orthographic view in the front view and I also prefer to have shading on. Okay
now I'm going to select the pelvis control again and I'm going to expand
this bit here now we don't change the scale on the pelvis control so we
can just turn the scale off right because we're not using it we also don't
add any translation on the pelvis bone so we can turn that off
and now we can look at these graph values they're color coded so XYZ is
RGB so red green and blue. X will always be red, so since we don't add any
rotation on the x-axis you can see that this is a straight line and you can just
ignore this turn this off and now we can let me just select this bit here so I
would I prefer to visually verify what this value is doing so if I press the G
key and then move it you can see it's the immediate effect on the character
so this controls the angle of the belt line right and this controls the
overall twist of the legs so that way we can know what these values are
doing. Now I can isolate either of these graphs by just doing shift H well
just select one so it's highlighted and do shift H to just isolate it
that gets rid of the others and now I'm going to expand this bit here go to modifiers and then this you have to
select the first frame so the cursor on the first frame and then just add
a cycles modifier right so this gives us a smooth incoming and outgoing graph so
similarly on the y-axis let me just select this shift H isolate it and
then add a cycles modifier now what I'm going to do here is to
select all of these key values and then press G and then three, three will move
it three frames forward so that means that our new low point is on the down
right so we just modified the animation without messing about over here in the
viewport so if you look at if you bring back the Z values you can
see that its high point was here and lo was there while this thing is had a low
point here and the high was over here so we just modify it now if I play this
animation this actually looks more natural now because we
updated the low point for the belt movement. I can similarly dampen or
amplify the entire tracks if I was to select all of these values here like so
I can do s to scale Y to lock the y-axis and then i can just move this .. the entire thing so that it's really to one side or just dampen it so it's
barely moving or even flip it around and right-click to cancel. So you can use
this method to dampen or amplify movement in your animation back in the
layout panel let's go back into pose mode now from contact to down if I
just slide on the timeline you can see that this foot is now moving backwards
and this foot moves forward but we don't want that to happen from contact to down
we want both feet to move backwards so that this distance is maintained for
this duration so I'm just going to go to down well let's just count the
distance here so it's one two three four five six. Six squares here half of this
one and half that so in down what I'm going to do is then just cancel this
rotation and then I'm going to rotate this entire thing like so
well like so and then move it back so it has a distance of one two three four
five six and almost seven so maybe a bit forward and then perhaps just a little
bit more .. all right like so. Moving forward onto the pass position don't
want this to be, yeah we don't want any rotation on this control here and I want
this to be further up like so. I'm just going to look at the other side and
we don't need this to be too high off the floor, just clearing the floor
so it's not in the way and that looks good to me okay and now we can just copy this paste
it on the other down it shift+control+V so its flipped, so it gets the other
foot and then the pass position copy this go to the other pass and then paste
it flipped - so it's on the other foot and we don't really change anything on
the up so that should be that and it's kind of walking now we can improve this
quite a bit so let's work on that now let's look at it from the front so when
you go to down I want to rotate it so it's more like .. vertical right so
straight up and then on the pass position I want to rotate this lock
the z axis move it like so and then grab lock on the x axis and move
this whole thing over there so like. Then move it a bit more to the side I think like that and then it'll automatically
come back and back on to the contact alright so we changed the down so copy on
the other side control ctrl shift V and then we change the pass position so copy
and on the other pass shift control V to paste flipped and now you have a
modified animation there is one more motion we need to add
to the torso control so I'm just going to select this ok so right now
it doesn't move side to side so I'm going to go to the pass position grab and
lock the x-axis and then just going to move it slightly like so so it's a bit
just a tiny little bit to one side right then I'm going to copy this and paste it
flipped so it is to the other side on the other pass position now this is
going to cause a bit of a problem if you're going to the animation I'm going
to expand this. The torso control is selected here so these are all torso
graphs and I'm just going to find the x location and shift H to hide it now
because we were copy pasting all of the keys back and forth earlier we have some
unwanted keys here all right so this is a pass position and this is the other
pass and this is the contact so we don't want a key on the down or the up here so
I'm just going to delete this. Delete this one, delete the key on the up.
So we want to keep the contact, delete the second down and delete the second up so
this is all we want and we can also delete this one to get a really smooth
graph here so playing this it now move side to side the belt line is moving
it's you know right now the movement might be too much okay so what we're
doing here we just want to get right movements in and then we can use the
graph editor dampen or amplify some parts so it looks good that's for later on we
do to polish later on. Right now we just need to have something that works so we should also add a cycle modifier
here so if you see this bit here contact second contact it's outside our
range so if we put a cycles here you'll see that this graph actually changes so
the way it exits and enters the keys within our range actually changes based
on whether or not there's a cycles modifier so you should always add one
when it makes sense, our animation makes it a little bit better now if we play
this from the contact to the down position if you look at this heel
control you'll see it goes down down down what we want to make it go faster
so what we can do is go into animation and with the control selected we can
look at its graph values on the X Euler rotation let me just isolate this
with shift H I can select this bit here, this key press T and make it
linear so that'll make it go down faster similarly if I move the timeline
forward go to the second contact position I can select this control here, I'll
select this graph shift H to isolate it T and make this linear as well you
can also move this key back by one if you want so that would be just G and
minus one to move it back one frame to make this go even faster but I think
I'll leave it as it is in this video okay back in layout if I go into pose
mode and we take a look at what this animation looks like you can see that it
does look like he's walking especially with the perspective turned on it this
is not a half-bad animation though many shortcomings but right now all we
want is a start something that we can build on so I think this works pretty
well for the lower body and the next video will check out the upper how
to make the upper body so be sure to subscribe and like this video if you
want more of this kind of content and if you have any ideas on how to
make this even better write them down in the comments. I am myself just learning
this stuff so you know anything you have to say, anything you have to add, be sure to put them into the comments and like the video and I'll see you in the next one thanks
