Hello I've been summoned by my sister to see if I got any help for you. Hello I am a pro animator, it pays my bills, so I got a few ✨credentials✨ here.
Dude for your first walk this is pretty dang nice! Is this rig yours too? This rig is lovely! The model and texture are sooo nice!! Those toes can SQUASH! And I love the design so much!
As for the animation, let's go.
First off, you got the main idea right, but you're missing some important stuff! A biped walk cycle breaks down into 2 basic poses: Contact and Passing.
Contact is where both feet are touching the ground, and is the sometimes the lowest point in the cycle. Passing is when one foot is, well, passing the weight bearing leg, and is the highest point in the cycle. (yeah yeah I know that ^ image from Richard Williams' Animator Survival guide shows something different, and it's valid, but for animals I find the passing pose is usually the high point.)
Speaking of weight, that's the next thing I wanna talk to you about. Take some time to walk in front of a mirror, or record yourself walking. From the side and from the front. Pay close attention to what your hips do as you shift from one leg to the other. The leg that takes the weight is straight, strong, and the body shifts over it to keep the center of gravity stable over it. Stand in front of a mirror and balance on one leg, what does your body do? Switch to the other leg, see how it shifts? That's weight! In locomotion it's going to be visible in the speed of the movement, the moments where joints buckle a smidge before taking up the weight- the toes spreading on contact with the ground, the knee and ankle bending a bit as the weight shifts before straightening out, little things like that.
you can see a bit of that "catching the weight" in this older animation I did some time ago for Animation Mentor's animal animation class; the hind leg the hock/ankle dips a bit with the weight, in the front it's the shoulder shooting up as the weight settles.
Load up on footage of chickens walking, ostriches walking. Watch some elephants walking to get a feel for how much of a shift there needs to be for a HUGE animal. So much of animation is just filling your eyeballs, your brain, your blood with reference material. Go watch some good dinosaur documentaries and study how they animated these big heavy animals to give you some ideas and guidance. Walking With Dinosaurs (the og one) is a good one, and so is Prehistoric Planet. The first Jurassic Park movie was also animated by experts. And then go experiment! 3D has the huge advantage of being incredibly forgiving. Save new versions so there's backups, try different timings. If it doesn't work, well you got backups!
IDK if blender has animation curves, I've barely worked with blender, but the feet should have a straight curve when on the ground, no ease at all, as that will make the feet slide all over.
Start with getting the contact and passing poses set, copy-paste the numbers from the controls to make sure you've got exact mirrored poses; that makes it much easier to get stuff working evenly. Focus on where the highest and lowest points of the movement are, use your references for that, as a walk isn't necessarily going to be divided up perfectly; the highest point of the hips will not usually be the highest point of the head in an animal cycle, for example. Secondary stuff like the follow through of tails, or other dangly bits can wait until you've got the body working juuuust right.
Anyway, hope that helps! happy animating!
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