Let's get started with creating a walk cycle with our Bones character.
But first, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to do with the walk cycle and want to walk
cycle consists of if you were to see your best friend walking at a distance and you could barely make
them out, you would probably know it's your best friend or relative or whoever, because a walk cycle
is very specific to each person.
As subtle as it may be, everyone has little differences to their walk cycle.
So as generic and boring is as animating a walk may seem to some people, it can actually be very,
very telling about their character, their mood, what type of person they are and their age.
It could be all these types of things.
So we're going to focus on kind of a more basic one to start with.
But also just keep in mind that you can add a lot of character to a walk cycle.
If you need any motivation or examples of this, just take a look at Kevin Perry's one hundred different
types of walks.
He starts out with a generic, but then does a lot of different types.
So definitely go through here and see kind of all of these different different kinds.
They're pretty exaggerated, but the general idea is one foot in front of the other.
So let's take a look at this in Photoshop real quick, where we can kind of break it down even more
simply.
So we have basically two poses we're going to focus on first in this lesson, which is what's called
the contact pose and the passing position.
So we have contact passing, contact passing, and it's going to switch legs.
And if we just switch these layers on and off, it almost looks like this drawing is walking even with
just two drawings and two poses.
So that shows you how important these poses are.
And poses like this are called can be called several different things.
They could be called key poses.
So these could be kind of the main poses.
They could also be considered the extreme poses, meaning these are the furthest that the person travels.
So they extend their legs at the extreme here.
This is the extreme distance that this foot travels this way.
It could also, you know, the extreme of the height.
So if we look at the contact and passing position, we can see that the top of the center of gravity
of the hips here are passing this horizon here, set by the contact.
The contact is lower and in the passing it goes higher because the leg is getting straight and it's
right underneath the hips.
So we need to start to begin to think about the biomechanics of this.
Why does a walk look the way it does?
And this really gets to the heart of animation, which is observation and using reference.
And don't just think that when you become an animator that you just make all of this stuff up in your
head.
You really need to look at reference, how you walk, film yourself.
You look at other people walking, look at your favorite movies or characters of people, but use reference,
preferably not animated reference, so that you kind of get the original source and you don't get someone
else's interpretation of it.
So I always look at reference and, you know, we're going to start without it because I don't want
us to overanalyze reference and get hung up on that.
But definitely know that, you know, these things are all rooted in biomechanics and how things actually
move and work.
So let's jump into Miah and start with this scene.
Ten Walk Cycle.
Start here.
What I'm going to do first is hide everything that we're not going to need.
So I'm going to go to Windows and go to outliner and I'm a hide the hat and I'm going to select everything
above the waist.
And put it in its own display layer over here and just hit the visibility off.
So now all we have are the legs cool.
So let's start with the contact poses.
I will first grab one of the legs and just drag it forward, drag the other one back.
And when we're doing this, we want to make sure that we're doing it at a specific distance.
So let's say something like eight here and maybe a little further back on that one, maybe like maybe
like negative nine.
And now we need to drag the center of gravity down.
But, you know, people don't walk like this when we walk.
We actually try to keep our foot on the ground as long as possible so we can push off with our back
foot.
So I'm going to use the roll here to indicate that.
And then on this, we do a heel to toe motion on the front foot, right.
Our heel strikes first and then it goes to toe when we're walking someone to put it in the heel position.
So now that means we didn't have to pull our center of gravity down that far.
Just bring this back up.
Another little thing to think about is the fact that our hips rotate.
Right.
They don't just stay straight here.
When we are reaching forward with a foot, we actually do so with our hips as well.
So you reach forward with the hips.
So let's bring the hips around so that they're reaching with that front leg.
That means we can bring up the center of gravity even more to try to straighten these legs out.
I'm just going to bring this foot roll back maybe a little bit so that leg gets a little straighter
and I'm just going to bring this toe up just a little bit.
So now we have our first pose.
So I'm going to select all of the controls.
But first, I'm going to make sure that I'm not selecting any geometry.
So I'm a click this little geometry button and click the joint button here so that I know I'm only selecting
locators and curves.
Someone had s on my keyboard to set a key frame of frame one.
I'm going to decrease the time line here a little bit so we can focus in on fewer frames.
I'm going to go forward to, let's say, frame 20 and I'm just going to reduce this down to 40.
So let's set a key frame on all of these as well.
And now let's reverse this.
So let's bring this foot back.
And this is why we had exact numbers here so that we can kind of match them on either side.
So I'm just going to look at this other foot.
It's negative 27 seven.
It's going to go negative.
Twenty seven.
And I'm going to take this toe control to zero, so it's back on the ground, then I'm going to reverse
this rotation to negative fourteen point whatever, does it really have to be exact?
Exact.
But just to kind of give us an idea that they're in the same ballpark.
This was eight.
And let's go jump back to this frame so we can see what the role was, was pretty much 20 there.
So we can say 20.
Cool.
So now we have our two contact poses just for one leg, because remember, this is going to need to
happen more than once.
So we have this one leg and it looks not very impressive right now.
But this is animation.
You know, you need to get comfortable with seeing things not perfect.
I know that's one thing.
When I started drawing that kept me from being very good at drawing because I wouldn't want to continue
past seeing like a bad, you know, draft of a drawing.
So that's going to happen in animation.
Just like in anything else.
You have to start with the basics and build a foundation.
So let's continue to refine this animation to make it look even better.
Let's go to frame ten, which is right in the middle of what we've already done, and make our passing
position so we can bring up the leg that should be passing and we want to rotate the foot down just
a little bit so that the toe is just barely off the ground, because as humans, we are kind of lazy
and we also want to be efficient.
So we don't want to bring the leg all the way up here to walk every time.
That I would definitely be a unique walk, but it's not typical of what most walks are.
So the other thing we need to do is make sure this is flat on the ground.
So let's make the foot be zero and let's bring up the center of gravity.
So the leg is straight, as we saw in the Photoshop kind of drawing I was doing earlier.
Let's bring this up maybe a little bit more and rotate the foot back down.
So the other thing we need to do is because this is on one leg now, we need to shift the weight over,
because if we look at the center of gravity, it's not under where the foot is.
So we need to make sure always that the center of gravity is being held up by something.
So let's push this over so that now the center of gravity is a little more supported by the foot that's
still on the ground.
The other thing we can do is we can lift up the hips because the body is trying to lift this foot off
the ground and the hips are trying to assist.
It is trying to lift this leg and this foot off the ground so it can push it forward.
So now that means we can bring the center of gravity even higher, try to straighten out that leg that's
on the ground.
So now, if we were just to look at these three poses and play them back, I'm just going to select
all the curves, deselect the locator here and put them on their own layer and hit P here so it dislikes
it.
So it will won't show the curves on playback.
And I'm going to start to name these so that we won't lose track of what they are, let's say upper
body.
I'll say lower Condes.
Cool.
Now, let's play this back, so we basically have one stride of a walk here and it still could use a
lot of work, but you kind of get the idea of where this is going.
So let's do this for the other side, the next lesson, and we'll go a little quicker and then we'll
continue to refine and add better timing and spacing and maybe go into the graph editor a little bit.
Thanks for watching and I'll see in the next lesson.