Animating a Walk Cycle

My method of animating a walk cycle

Recently we were tasked to animate an emotive walk cycle. I did a walk cycle before by following a tutorial so I thought this task would be easy… then I started and it turns out it’s not.  After many failed attempts I think I got it! Here’s what I did (I am animating in 3D):

As you might know there are two ways to approach an animation namely pose to pose and straight ahead. With pose to pose you would key the most important positions and then add the in between positions later. With straight ahead you would start with one step and key all the positions of all the limbs then the next key, and so forth. There are great books on how to do a walk cycle such as The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams, which is good reference.

You can tell a whole story with a walk and thus it is important to decide on what story you want to tell and do all the necessary planning before just jumping right into it. I decided to do a male model walk which is fast but not as fast as a run and there is allot of hip action involved. To make it interesting I used a bulky big character rig.

The process I follow isn’t pose to pose or straight ahead but rather something in between. I struggled at first with the positioning of the body and the feet and decided to let my character walk on one place instead of moving forward (I’ll try that when I’m more comfortable with this process).

When animating a walk cycle you first have to plan it. There are 5 important phases or positions in a walk which is contact, down, pass, up, and then it ends with contact. This is where I got confused… because then in actuality you have to repeat these twice to get one full step, which I figured out the hard way. When the planning is done, let the animating begin!

First I figured out the rhythm of my walk. This was most possibly the hardest and most important part of the process. I used a framerate of 24 and decided to do one step on the 12th frame for a brisk walk (which was at frame 13 because you cannot key frame 0). I keyed my feet at the right positions in the Z axis but I suggest you play with your rig a bit before animating and then realizing that it’s not what you’re going for.  Also remember that even if key 25 is not showing in your 24 frame clip, you have to key it because otherwise if you loop it your action will just die down at frame 24. I found Williams’ example a good one to use as reference but I made my own adjustments to understand it better (my brain got confused with both legs in one picture). I then keyed the feet’s positions in the Y axis.

After keying the feet I keyed the body’s up and down movement in the Y axis. I keyed the positions at frame 1 and 25 first as they were the same and then 13 as it was the opposite of 1 and 25. Only after that I keyed the other positions in between. The next thing I did is to key the hips’ rotation, first on the Z axis and then on the Y axis. Please note that I did have actual video of footage of a model walk that I used as reference (I encourage you to do this as it helped me immensely).

After the hips I went back to the feet and did their rotation and the toe’s rotation on the Z axis. I then animated the spine and upper body’s rotation and the feet’s position in the X axis before moving to the arms. I keyed everything to key 1,4,7,10,13,16,19,22,25. Only later did I do the offset by moving the keyed movements to one or two keys before or after the original position.  Last I did the hands which I positioned in a natural pose and rotation them where necessary. Do a play blast regularly to see your progress and tweak the positions when you are unhappy with them.

And there you have it! Everyone will have their own style of animating so I encourage you to play around until you find it.

Reference: Williams, Richard. The Animator's Survival Kit. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2009. Book.