R egardless of whether you are a non-experienced, a beginner or an professional animator, a walk cycle is something that every person needs to know. This type of motion is so natural as we, as humans, unconscious experience it everyday. In order to make this illusion convincing, the character can't be floating all over the place. Of course, he's not actually sliding, but to give the illusion of walking in place, the feet "slide".Now let's add an in-between between our third and fourth extreme.Now add an in-between between our second and third extreme. Now the character’s body is higher up because the front leg is passing the back leg—the body is at the same level as our second extreme.Start by drawing the floor guidelines. Looking good!
One of the things that characters do the most to get around and move is walking! Make adjustments for various leg lengths, avoid foot slippage when looping frames, and fine-tune the walk behavior for each puppet’s performance. It'll loop automatically. We are animating a simple side view walk, but the foot that is farthestfrom us will be slightly further backthan the foot that is closest to us. That’s because animators make their characters walk using a walk cycle, a set of images that cover the basics of a walk. Photoshop/Animation/Movie Project: Walk Cycle If you’ve ever watched someone in a cartoon walking, you’ve probably notice that the walk repeats itself exactly. Keep checking that the feet are not floating and that the character looks grounded.Keep cleaning up your animation frames. Let’s concentrate on getting the legs right first.In this tutorial I will be taking you through the steps of how to animate a character walking in place. Walk cycles typically intimidate a lot of new and even experienced animators for good reason…. In this tutorial I show you how to draw a dog and animate a dog walk cycle using Adobe Photoshop motion, in under 5 minutes. Now let's sweeten it and add some in-betweens!Finally, let's add an in-between between our fourth extreme and our first extreme. Also, a wiki page is dedicated to this subject.. Don’t forgetto work rough and not get bogged down with making it look perfect. The foot closest to us (the character's right foot) is flat and grounded and is sliding back. In this tutorial I will be taking you through the steps of how to animate a character walking in place. Wow, that's a lot of walking!It may not look or work correctly on your browser.Add arms to the first extreme. It's pretty much the same pose as our first extreme, except the legs are reversed.Draw our second extreme, in which the leg in the back ispassing the leg in the front. Now that we have the feet and body looking good and moving well,let's add the arms. I "cheated" the arm farthest from us so we can see it peeking from behind the body, but normally the arm would probably be directly behind the body and would be blocked altogether.A walking character is one of the most important things to learn as an animator. It's just missing one thing...Now add arms to the drawing between your first and secondextreme.We’ll add arms to the extremes one through four first, and then add the arms to our in-betweens, in the same order in which we drew them.Draw our first pose/extreme. You don’t want the back leg to start to come up before the front footmakes contact with the ground, or the character would fall on his face. Nice! Animation is all about creating the illusion of movement. In most cases, people do not stay the same height as they walk—they bob up anddown as one leg passes the other. We will only animate the legs and body; the arms we will animatelater. Remember, practice makes perfect. Don’t be afraidto work rough and sketch through the body to work out where the leg attaches.Now that we have our animation looking sweet, we can lose the red floor guidelines and start tightening up the line for our walking character. In this case, I’m going to show you a simple walkwith the character's arms swinging with the walk.Let's see how our walk looks so far! If the walk cycle is the only thing you want in your animation, you could just make the timeline the same length as the walk cycle. That’s because animators make their characters walk using a walk cycle, a set of images that cover the basics of a walk.Here’s the illustration of the walk cycle from angryanimator: So let's get to it!Let's see how it looks so far! Even though the leg farthest from usis partially blocked by the front leg, let's make sure the leg“attaches” correctly to his hip on the side farthest from us. It starts with the other leg first, but it works exactly the same way:Notice that the head and body only change in height, and that the arm is the same image with a slight transform to make it swing.If you’ve ever watched someone in a cartoon walking, you’ve probably notice that the walk repeats itself exactly. The character needs to be grounded.Keep going—we're almost done!