Animation Tutorial 1! GODDAMN YOU WALK CYCLES
So I’ve been thinking about making animation tutorials, and voilá!
DISCLAIMER: I’m a human animation student, therefore still learning individual. What I teach in these things is subjective to what works for ME. Also, I’m sorry about the ugly drawings, but i hate flash for drawing, and I can’t animate in photoshop for my life.
Animation dudes and dudettes, let me introduce to you one of the most hated yet necessary movements: WALK CYCLES.
The reason as to why they’re so complicated is the fact that there’s a whole bunch of things happening at once, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. So first let’s separate these one by one:
For the sake of simplicity, I’ll exclude arms for now.
Together they form Captain Planet a Walk Cycle
But Pencilwing! How the fuck am I supposed to draw that?
Great question proverbial reader!
For a basic walk cycle you really just need 4 frames (some people say 3 but fuck ‘em).
Your starting point. Since it’s the widest pose in a walk cycle, not only is it necesary, but also the easiest to start with. You’ll build the rest of the walk cycle from this.
Next you’ll draw the lowest pose. As the body hits the ground from the previous step, it’ll coil on itself. The foot making contact with the ground is firmly set, and the knee is bent. The back foot peels off the ground, knee also bent. The torso, head and pelvis all go down.
Our next contestant is the highest pose (I know, crazy right?). The leg set on the ground is completely straight, lifting the whole body with it. There’s a vertical movement to this frame, and it’s what gives walking that “bobbing” feel. Exagerate as needed, depending character and situation.
This is the one which some people consider optional in a core walk cycle. It’s basically an inbetween from pose three to pose one (inverted, ill talk about this in a moment). It’s function is to unify the whole walk cycle, but it’s not just an inbetween- the back foot prepares to land, and the front one is just about to peel off the ground, but remains firmly on it.
But Pencilwing! Where’s the other step?
Jesus christ, don’t you ever shut up? The other step is basically the same 4 drawing, but inverting which limb is doing what.
So if this is how the first frame looks:
The fifth frame looks like thiiiiiiiis:
And so on with the rest of it.
There! You know how to walk cycle! Bear in mind that these drawings are quads, meaning that in a 24 fps animation, each image would last 4 frames. Inbetweening is necessary to smoothen it out, and making it look decent, but this is the basic gist of it.
Since you really just append them to the rest of the animation, unless they’re super vital in the movement specific to your character, I skipped them over. But since you’ll more often then not animate characters which are proud owners of arms, here’s a slowed down gif so you can see what’s going on.
I’ll cover them more in detail in a tutorial about secondary movement, but that’s for da FUTUREEEEEEE (So like, comment and subscribe, you mindless sheeple).
Hope this was exhausting to read helpful!
