Learning How To "Walk"

When it comes to animating, walk cycle animation is the one of the first animations animators have to learn which can be tricky in some circumstances. That is mainly because beginner animators come to realise that it involves a good understanding of physics and animatics. In my case, I have studied how to properly animate my puppet walking, and got some help from online resources.

I have looked up these two videos to help me break down the walk cycle:

With the help from these resources, I have broken down the cycle to two different poses Contact and and Passing. Contact is when the front foot's heel touches the ground, and passing is when the back foot passes the front foot. This happens to every leg. In between these two poses, there are two transitional  different poses, Recoil, that is the body is going up, and High-Point, that is the body is going down. Below is an illustration for that:

Walk cycle breakdown (Figure 1)

I first started with the basics, so I shot a walk cycle, on twos with 8 fps, with only four different poses, left contact, left passing, right contact and left passing.

4 poses walk cycle

Later I added the other poses, recoil and high-point, in between on one with 8 fps.

8 poses walk cycle

Then I tried to make the movement smoother via adding one transitional frame between pair set of these poses, however the frame rate was increased to 16 fps.

16 poses walk cycle

Once I was confident enough to try a proper shoot, I did a walk cycle like the previous one, but with some tweaking to the puppet and the rig. In this one, I tried to add more personality to the character. That is to have it as an option for my final film.

Fined 16 poses walk cycle

I realised that I was focusing primarily on the movement of the legs. Thus, I decided to do another shoot only for the arms to see how they can be animated in a more natural way.

Arms walk cycle

Reference:

Figure 1: http://www.angryanimator.com/word/2010/11/26/tutorial-2-walk-cycle/