Animate a Walk Cycle in Adobe Animate

1. Introduction: Hi there. My name is Chad trough German, and you are watching how to animate a walk cycle inside of adobe, animate with adobe animate. There are so many things you can dio. The possibilities are really limitless. But if you're looking to animate, it's best to begin somewhere and do something that's a little bit simple but also has some complexity and new wants to it. And thats why a walk cycle is a great thing. To learn in this course will be creating a class project where we start with an already designed character. We're going to bring it into animate and by using a variety of techniques such as applying high poses, low poses, going through an adding recoil, understanding how the limbs move back and forth, as well as adding animate features such as key framing, tweeting symbols, parenting and more. You should be able to go through this hour long course and create a quick, simple walk cycle, which you can then share with the world. Or you can use these techniques to build your own walk cycles, adding different characteristics and personalities to it, as well as using your own character designs. If you wish so again, in this course, the class project comes with the completed walk cycle, along with all the steps in between. So if you want to start at Step one and build a step 23 and four, there are files for every single step. So that way you can reference it if you wish, so you can use my files. Or you can use your own character and fall along that way as well. It's completely up to you. By the time we're done here, you'll have a complete walk cycle, and I hope that you'll share it with the class because I would love to see what you come up with. So with that said, open up, animate CC and get ready because you're about to get started. 2. Adding Guides and Setting First Contact Pose: for this video we're working off of 03 chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. So first, let's import that graph and we can import an animate by going to file import, and you can choose to import to stage or import toe library. In this case, we are going to be putting this around the stage right away, so we might as well import to stage. So I'm just going to use that option or control R or command are if you are on Mac now. Once we bring this up, we're going to go to the right course, of course. So right here exercise files and inside of your exercise files, you'll see that we have a walk graph and a one. You'll see that we have a run cycle graph as well as a walk cycle graph. We're going to grab the walk cycle graph first. So well, let's click on that and then choose open. And this is a pretty popular graph. If you were to go Google and search for walk, cycle reference or graph or whatever, you will see this typically pop up first, and I do like using those particular graphic. It just seems to be very clean and nice, and it demonstrates clearly what we're supposed to be doing here with the walk cycle. You can definitely see that there is shifting and weight, as well as the bobbing up and down motion and just where your legs and arms should be during each stage, as well as some nice little labels that help us identify which each of these poses are. So with that we have this graph in place and currently, since I put it onto the stage, it's sharing the same layer as the chad symbol, and I don't want that. I want this graph on its own layer. So just to quickly correct that I'm going to use Control X or Command X to cut that image, come down here to my new layer option. I can rename layer one, then to walk reference, and then we're just going to use control V. You can also use control shift V. You'll see. I pasted it twice here just to show you control shift V will paste it in place, so if you copied it and you wanted to be exactly where you had it when you copied it. You can use control shift V or command shift V. But if you just want to paste it without worries of the location, control the works as well. I'll probably end up moving this reference around as we work, but I can place it up here for right now. And one more thing we can also do is double click on this layer that we just made and you'll see here on the bottom where it says type. We can switch it to guide. So I'm just gonna click that and then click OK, and the only thing that will do for us is, let's say you accidentally have it on the stage when you go to render your file. This won't show up. So if we use control, enter or command enter just to test out what we have going on here, you can see that the reference is not visible on the stage because it's set to a reference layer. So with that, we can go in and add in the guides for feet and arms as well, so you'll notice for the walk cycle. We come over here and zoom in, and one easy way to zoom in, by the way, is the holding control and use your mouse wheel? I'm assuming command on the Mac would also do the same, and you'll see here that we start with the walk cycle already in place. That's how we get the cycle going. We have to kind of start mid cycle and then build it up from there. And typically you start with the contact point you'll see here. The contact point refers to the fact that both feet are contacting the ground right now. And we had the recoil which allows them than to enter the spring up phase for passing and passing means the arms and legs air passing each other. You have the high point, which is when you spring up at your furthest peak. Then you're gonna come down to the contact where your legs will then be swapped. So we start with the back leg forward. But now we have the front leg forward, and then we basically loop that again. But the limbs are opposite until we get back to the original contact point. And so when I'm going to do is create a symbol for the walk cycle as well as create this first pose so we can lay down some guidelines. So when we start to animate out, we know where to put our feet. Because sometimes if you start moving things around, it can be hard to remember where exactly the ground line for your feet are, as well as how far out your arms should go. So those are the guides were going to placing in right now. So first, let's duplicate this symbol because you may recall, if I click once on this and we go to the properties under object, this is Chad stand so we don't want to create the walk cycle in the Chad stands symbol. We want to use this as its own thing, and we want to be able to use it when we want it, so we don't want to compromise it. So one thing we can do just to make this easier is right. Click on the chads symbol and then choose to duplicate symbol Here. We can come in and just rename this to Chad walk and then hit. Okay, You could see now that the instance name has changed. Two. Chad walk. Also, if we go into the Chad folder here in our library and go into animations and they going to stand. You'll see that Chad walk is there. I can Then if I wanted to just put this outside and create a new folder for this, if I wanted to call it walk, and then we can bring that in just like that, just to keep things organized. I really recommend you keep your library organized, because if you had a bunch of stuff to it, it could get kind of confusing. So always go back to the library as often as possible just to keep things organized. Same goes for this graph right here. We might as will create a new folder for this, and we can just call this one references and just bring the graph in there. So we now have the simple taking care of this is going to be a Chad walk symbol. We're not going to override the stand symbol, which is important. And once you have that set up, we can double click to go inside. So now we are inside the Chad walk symbol, and we're going to start by laying down some different reference points for us, so to begin, we can come in and grab the line tool, which is right up here. It's also end on the keyboard, and I recommend choosing different colors for your back limbs versus your front limbs. So in the case of the back leg, I'm going to use a red line. And for the front leg, I'll use a blue line. So we'll come in. Click on the stroke color and let's just choose read from the list. So just a standard red color is fine again. This is just for our eyes only, and we're gonna come down and draw a line that closely lines up with this back foot, and if you don't get it right the first time, it's totally fine. We can adjust it after the fact. Also, if you hold on shift in click and drag, you can create a perfectly horizontal line without any compromises and release. So now if we zoom in, you can see that the line isn't quite where it needs to be, so we're just going to hit V on the keyboard to bring up the selection tool, click on that line and then using our arrow keys. Just nudge this down until we line up with that foot right there. So now one thing I'm going to do because I actually forgot to do this as I started and I could just redo this part of the video, but I think it's important to show you that these things do happen. I put this line on the head layer on accident. So we're going to do what we did before we cut peso lair. So we're just going to click on that line and then use Control X or Command X to cut. Let's go outside of the Chad group and create a new layer. And we're just gonna name this one Lim reference, and then I'll use control shift V to paste it back in. And we'll just continue building off of this layer as we add in the other lines. So for the next line, we're going to put it below the front foot. I'm just gonna click once on that line. I just made control, see or command see, and then control shift V or command shift V to paste in place. Now, at first, it might be hard to tell because it's overriding the other line. But if you use your down arrow, you can see here we can separate the two in place that line where we need it. The other thing we can do as well is click on that line, come over here to this stroke and change the color than to I would suggest either blue or green. Let just go with blue and click. OK, so there we are. We now have the lines set for the feet. So as we move the feet around, we always know where the ground is, which will help us create a more realistic and grounded looking animation. But we also need to put down the guides for the arms. So we're gonna do that really quick as well. So coming up here now, we're going to reference this guide and also looking at this. It might be better again going back and forth here a little bit, but it happens sometimes. Let's go back to seen one really quick, and I'm going to copy this reference now. We could just copy this and create a new layer, or we can come down and right click on that layer and then choose copy layers in the double . Click on this symbol to go back into the chat a walk symbol, and then we're gonna right click and then choose the pace layers. So now we have the walk graph here, and we can come in and move it around if we need to, because right now it's up there and we can't interact with it. Since it's outside the symbol, it might be better, especially given my screen resolution to have it so we can move it around and it's still a reference. So if we forget to hide it or whatever, it's not gonna be a big deal because it's still hidden. So now we want to come in and create the pose for arms where they're going to be the most spread out now you'll recall in the previous course. Or if you just have the knowledge from another course, are from just learning animate. We have set this rig up so that we are parenting layers, so if I move this shoulder, it's going to move the forearm along with the hand and the same goes for. If I were to bend my knees and all that kind of stuff, so I just wanted to remind you of that. That's how we have this set up. So we're going to come in and create the motion here for this contact pose. So that means where you need to bring out this arm and we can bring it up just like that and we can come into the back arm. At this point, you might find it useful when we go into this Chad group here to lock the body. So here's the body layer. We're just going to hit the lock button. So that way we can just grab the arm like this and we can animate and do what we need to dio. We could also, especially just temporarily here, hide that body might be a little bit easier just to kind of get this down. And we're going to move this one back like so click on the forearm and just bring it down. Like so Now the hands are swapped. We can adjust that right now. Let's just click on the front hand here. If we double click and go into the front hand, you'll recall from the previous course, or at least you can see here that we have three hand poses. So all I want to do is just click on that hand, go over here to the properties and under object. We want to locate the looping function right here and this Change this to one and make sure it's set to single frame. So that way they're both the same. We have fists for each hand, and we don't have to worry about that part. So now we're getting idea of where the arms are going to be. Let's go one step further and also move the legs similar to how we have it set up here. So for the back leg, we're going to bring that one forward like this and then four, your front leg, it's gonna come back more like So now, as you can see, we have a couple of issues here regarding how this is looking because as we bend these legs , they are being removed from the lines. And in this case, since it's a contact pose, we really need the feet to be on the ground for this. So this is where we can come in and start to manipulate things based on sort of our discretion as well as what we want in terms of style. One thing we could do is move all the layers down so that it matches the ground as close as possible. But even then, you might still have some issues with exactly how these will match. You could also choose to resize some of your layers. So right now, as you can see, if I were to come in and click on this particular symbol and then resize it, you can see that we can actually kind of do a squash and stretch effect, which could be very useful. So, looking at the graph, you can see that the leg isn't completely straight during this particular pose. But if we come in, we can adjust this a little bit. So if we wanted to, we could just grab the bottom portion right here and kind of bring it down like that, just kind of give it a little bit of a bend and then come back up here too, your calf or thigh. And just I should get back up like that. So that way you kind of have that Ben going on, similar to how we have it on this particular portion, but also it just looks a little bit better in general. And again, you can play around with this So you don't want this to be so long. The top portion you could could also come in here and just precise that a little bit and then resize the bottom portion as well. So that way you get more than even looking, Bend. Not you're looking at this. I might move the leg just a little bit back like that and then command and just bring it down a bit more. There we are Now. We're gonna do something similar on this side again. This one's more bent back this way, it seems. And then it kind of comes up like this a little bit. It's coming in here and adjusting this. So it's kind of about like that. The Let's try that again. Let's try grabbing it down here if I try to grab it up there. Since the pivot point is so close, it might be harder to rotate so you can come in and just sort of do this. Get this adjusted. So there you go. It's a little bit more bent and it looks similar to how it does in the graph. It might just bring this up a little bit more and that down a little bit. Okay, so that should be a pretty good indicator of what we need. So what I'm going to do then, is I could bring back the body. Just we can get a full view of this that's looking pretty good. We're now going to come in and just add in some lines for the boundaries of our motion. So that way we understand exactly where we can move with this and all that requires us to do is click on the line to will come back up here to our Lim references. So we have that layer selected and let me just hide the walk reference here, gonna zoom out and we're just going Teoh, start right about here holding shift and just draw down like so and I'm going to do the same on the other side as well. And at this point, we can also come in. We could change these lines just to a different color. So that way it is easy to look at compared to the lines on the bottom. We can look at these and be like Oh, yeah, that's for the spread of the legs versus the ground. And we're just going to zoom in now and make sure that this green line here touches the hell just like that. And this line right here will come in and touch the toe just like that. Now, the reason why we're doing this is so that way we don't accidentally breach these lines and it will cause the animation than to look a little bit wonky. So we want to make sure that we keep everything within these guides and we will have an easier time animating things out and ultimately is should look better. But there we go. We now have the first portion of the walk in place, in addition to some different guides to help us. You could also, if you wanted to put guides for your hands. But I think I should be okay with that. I think just having the leg guides is enough. And I think we should be able to run with this so we'll pause here and up next. We'll keep building this walk cycle 3. Posing the Recoil Points: for this video we're working off of 04 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're now going to go to the next step within the walk cycle, which is the recoil. So we start with the Contact Post, which we set up in the previous video. Then you're gonna go to your recoil, which if you look at this chart, it's the lowest point of the walk cycle. He's pressing down, he's gonna pass, and he's going to spring up to his highest point then afterwards. So here we're going to establish that low point, which is called the Recoil. I might also refer to it as the low point, and we're going to do both of these. So we'll do this pose as well as the recoil over here, and we can get started here by coming in. We want to double click on the Chad rig to go inside of that walk cycle symbol. Now, one thing I noticed in the previous video and I'm not quite sure why this happened. You'll see here that if I click on pelvis patch, it's actually a loose vector. And I don't want that when animating out it's possible this got swapped for something else because I thought I had the pelvis patch within my library. But that's okay. We're just going to click on this really quick and hit F eight and all the cement pelvis patch hit enter in that way, it's set up and good to go. It's just better to have. Everything is a symbol when you're animating out. So that way you can keep things more organized. So with that, we now want to come over here to the timeline and create a new key frame for that second pose so we can come up here and you'll see that we have the Chad group, and then we have all of our layers within that group. I'm just going to click once on the head, scroll down to the bottom four back hair holding, shift and click so that I'm selecting all of frame to for all those layers and then hit F six on the keyboard to insert keys. Unframed, too. This will be the first recoil pose that we're going to work on, so now I'm noticing something else. The hand is now pointing. This is because you'll notice that it's set toe loop and not a single frame. I didn't look at that when I was setting this up. It's a very simple fix. We're just going to set this to single frame and then put it to one. And from there as we add keys, it's stay then at single frame, so we don't have any issues. So now for the recoil we're going to come in. And if we look at our layers, we also need to make sure that walk reference and limb reference are also available. So I'm just going to let just expand this out to, like, frame 10 and then hit F 52 keys. That way we can see the references past frame one so unframed to now we could do that recoil as we were discussing, and I could bring back the chart here. Just so it's easy to work with in the symbol, and we can bring it up like so and again. The recoil is going to be a downward position, so we'll start by moving the body parts for the character down. So let's just come over here and I'm going to click on frame twos. Keys for all of these parts. So that way they're all selected. And you can see that the entire rig is now selected. And with the selection tool selected, I can use the down arrow or any arrow on my keyboard to move this group of symbols. But in this case, I'm just gonna go 123 Let's go four strokes down and you can see now if we come back here to frame one, we have that difference. Come back here to frame to it goes like this. So with that, we can use this then as the set up for this next pose. I'm just going to come in and look at this as a guide. So we're going to start bringing the front leg forward. During this particular cycle, I was going to use Q on the keyboard to slip the free transform tool so I can easily rotate . So just like that, click on your calf and just move it up to emulate what we're seeing on the screen. So about like that. And then we have the back leg bending inm. Or so we're just gonna grab this, maybe move it out a little bit like so and we can grab this one and move it down. So it's about like that, and looking at this, I might grab that top piece. Sometimes it's kind of finicky. Might have to zoom in, especially at my resolution. It's kind of hard to grab some stuff, but we're going to bring this up a little bit more and we want that foot to be flying the ground now for the arms. They don't move too much. If you look at what we're doing here, they just simply don't move all that much compared to that first contact pose. But I am going to do a little bit of movement. I was come in here and just kind of kick things back just slightly. Doesn't have to be much maybe just out a little bit like that. So now you go from 1 to 2. The problem is, besides the hair disappearing, which we will look at here once we finish. This is the fact that the foot is not within the guide. We want that to be in the red line, So in this case, we can just come in and we're going to do a little bit of shrinking here, So you can either try the top or bottom portion of the leg. I'll start with the top first and to see how it looks. I'm just gonna come in and shrink it up a little bit. And actually, I could shrink that part up a little bit and then come over here and then the shrink this part up. So that way, the foot is touching the red line. So there you go. So now you go from this pose to this pose just like that, and actually looking at this first contact pose, I must have just been looking at this wrong in the previous video. But we actually want this foot to be lower. So that's touching the blue. Just like that. Just a little bit. There we go. So that's frame one. And then that's framed, too. Now I'm going to do the opposite pose really quick here. So let just come over here and create another set of key frames. I'm gonna do it right after this pose. So we'll come over here to head scroll down, holding shift, click on back hair and then hit F six to assign key frames Now I'm going to jump over here to the second recoil. Since we have this on the down position and everything is in the position that it needs to be, we might as well just take care of this. And then we can arrange this key frame where we want it when it comes time to put it all together. So looking at the second recoil, all we have to do is just come in now and essentially copied this from the other side. So the front legs going forward, this leg is gonna be back just like that. And I could probably come into this one and just bring this one down a little bit more. So maybe about like this, and I could come in and just do a little bit of re sizing like so. And the arms also need to be swapped during this one. So we're just gonna come back like that and we can also keep an eye on that green graph here. We don't want to take the arms too far outside of that. That's why we have those guides there. And that looks about right compared to what we had. And we're just going to grab that other arm and bring it up like so. And then we can even bend this one up. Kind of like that. Okay, So as you can see here, this is what the opposite pose is going to look like. So you have your back leg out, but then we cycle back around the back leg is going to be going back, and the front leg is going to be going out. And so that's how that's gonna work out now, Right now, it doesn't look how it should simply because we need to go in and obviously adding all the in between poses for this, which will be doing. But sometimes it's easier just to kind of come in and do the opposite pose that you're creating. In that way, we can just move it around and put it where we need it. When time comes to added in and we'll be doing the same for the next video, we'll be doing both passing poses. We'll be doing both high points, and then we'll eventually wrap up by finishing up with the final contact that we didn't do before and that we could go in and polish it all up and then Tween if needed 4. Creating the Passing Keys: for this video we're working off of 05 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're going to double click to go back into the Chad symbol and we can resume our work. So this review, we have the contact pose and then we have the recoil pose and they were going to do passing high point contact and then recoil. So we have three poses in between before we go back to recoil. So with that in mind, let's just come over here to those third set of key frames that we added in. And I was going to come down here and select all of the Chad layers, and we're going to just add three keys in between one 23 So here we have the recoil, and then we're going to have the passing, the high point of contact, and then the second recoil that we created. So that way we can kind of start to plan this out and see where it's all going to go. So that means were onto passing, which is going to be the third position. So on frame three, we're going to select all of those keys that we need for Chad to scroll down here, holding shift and click to select frame three for all these layers and then hit F six to create keys. Now we're just going to come over here to the passing layer. And, as we can see for the passing layer, it appears that were at a very similar level to that of the original in terms of height. So let's come down here and first adjust that it's taking a look here and then using my arrow keys, I'll go up four keystrokes just like that. And as you can see, he's more at the level that he was during the contact post. So with that, we can come in and start to move the legs around. As you can see, since this is the passing pose, that's when the limbs are passing each other. So to start, we have the leg. If I use Q on the keyboard to select the free transform tool, we could just move this down like so and then move that come up like that and then we have the back legs starting to go behind, so we're just going to bring this one down click on this one and bring it over like So Now we should have a little bit of a bend here. So I'm going to come back to that top portion just like this. It's kinda like that and then come down and like this, I think that'll work a little bit better again. We're looking at the passing pose here, just kind of eyeballing all this. Maybe a little bit more This a little bit more of a bend like that. And then you can come in and justice size if you need to. So, looking at this, I might just during the front leg up a little bit more, Maybe something like that. So that way it's certain to pass over the back leg, and we do have a little bit of ah perspective change here. This is a profile view that we're looking at on the graph, and we have more of a 3/4 of you for the character. It still works. It just you're gonna have a little bit of a difference. For instance, this leg isn't completely passing over that one because of the way it's all set up. But it should give us a good idea. Now we're just gonna just the arms next. So coming in here, we can grab that free transform tool again. And we can move this arm down as well as this one just like that, something like that. And then we can come in and just bring this one down as well. Oops. Maybe just adjust the way. Just come in here and hide the body really quick. I actually think this is gonna look OK, but let's just also hide that pelvis patch or we can lock it, whichever it might have to hawk the front forearm as well. And we'll come in here and just grab that peace and just kind of move it over like that. There we go. So let's make sure we just bring everything back like so. And now we have the passing posts or the first passing pose done for this particular animation. So so far we go contact, we go recoil, and then you go passing just like that and we want to do the opposite now for this side right here. So we have the passing where basically we have the opposite. Occurring with the legs, the arms are gonna be very similar, but the legs are going to be swapped. So as we know, we moved the second recoil up to frame six, and the next passing frame takes place after frame. Six. It's gonna be unframed seven. So an easy way to do this is to select all of the keys on frame three. Just like that, we're going to hold on Ault and just drag over to frame seven and release that will duplicate the keys that you have selected, allowing us to start with that passing pose. The first passing pose and all we really need to do now is go in and just adjust the legs and the arms a little bit and we'll have that second passing pose done. So will come down and we're just going to again swapped the legs here and I might make this down just a little bit. There we go. So we're looking at again this passing pose, which means that the back leg should be up more like this while the front leg will be more down like that sledges command in. Get that situated so about like, that should be good and we can come over here to this back leg, sometimes again special with my resolution. It just kind of hard to select these things sometimes. But there we go. Just gonna bring this up a little bit more again. You can see the passing is kind of more of a 90 degree angle, so to speak. So not quite, but close. So what has come in and kind of set that up? Now, you don't have the follow this graph verbatim. You can, of course, do your own things and find out your own style. You could create a different block entirely, um, or lazy walk, more confident walk, whatever the case is. Hopefully just by doing this, you'll kind of get an idea. And then from there you can build up your own personality using your different characters and your art. So we're going to just do a couple more things here. The front leg needs to be touching the blue line. So what is going to come in and just do a little adjustment just like that? So we go from this to this for the passing pose on that side. And then here's the passing post for the 1st 1 And then there's the second passing pose. The only thing we should do is just maybe adjust the arms slightly again. It's not a huge, huge deal, but I think coming in here and just kind of adjusting them a little bit. This adds variety compared to the previous passing pose. So about like that. Okay, there's this one thing I'm noticing and on the second recoil on frame six, the front leg should actually be down on that blue line again, A very slight change, but it's going to do that really quick. So that way it's done, and everything should be good. So again, that back foot should always be on the red line when it's touching the ground. And the front leg should be on the blue line, of course, when it's touching the ground. So there we go. That's looking a little bit better, all right, so we'll pause here and up next will keep building this up by creating the high poses 5. Adding the High Points: for this video we're working off of 06 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're going to dive right back into our symbol and create the high point. Now the high point is when you lift off with your character and he or she is at his highest point within the walk cycle. As you can see here, we're pushing off with our back leg first. Eventually, it's going to be with the front leg as we swap the limbs and it's at the highest point. So we're going to have to go in and manipulate the body again as well. So to begin, let's just come in here in unlock all of our layers, and I'm going to go to frame four and create key frames for all of the Chad body pieces. So let's make sure we get all of them, and we're just going to select the mall and hit F six to create a syriza keys. Since this is the high point and I have all my pieces selected, I'm going to hit up on my arrow key four times, so that way we can move him up. Since this is the high point, then we're just going to come in here and start manipulating the symbols as we have before . So I'm Congrats. This one right here in this sort of move it up a little bit like that and for the back leg , I'm going to come down here, we'll grab the back thigh, and we can just move it back like that. So what? That back leg, we can come in and just manipulated a little bit more just like that. And we can also do some re sizing with limbs so I could come in really quick and just kind of bring this down again to match that red line again. You always want your feet to be matching that. And let's also come in now and do the arms so we could just move this back, move this down, and then for your back bicep here should be grabbed that, and we could just move that up. You bring this up a little bit like that again using the green guides to ensure that your not going too far out of bounds with any of that And if you need to shrink things up, you can and if it's outside a little bit, it's not a huge deal. But I might come in here and just grab that bicep and bring it down a little bit more like that. So now that is your high point for this particular part of the walk cycle. So we go from here to here. Now, we're going to do what we did before, and we're gonna copy this over in place it on the other side. So that way we can do the opposite effect really quick. So I'll grab back hair scroll all the way up to head holding, shift and click. Let's make sure that we have nothing locked here while doing this just in case. So there we go. And I'm just going to click Ault holding my mouse button and move this over to frame eight , and we can look at the second high point. And as we know by now, it's essentially just the opposite effect of what we were doing so we can start with the arms. I could move this one up like so and then for the back bicep. Just come in and we're going to bring that down so we're more sitting like that and I can come in and just manipulate that a little bit as well. There we are. And then we have the front leg we need to manipulate as well. So it's gonna come down here, get that situated about like that, and then we have the back leg bending up. Then what kind of like this? We could maybe shrink that in a little bit. There we are. And of course, we can come in now with this front leg and just manipulate it. Make sure it goes down to the blue line. There we go. So now you have the second high point. Just like that. There's our first high point in our second high point. So now we basically need to come in and complete this by adding in the last two contact poses. So the final contact pose and then the middle contact pose. And then we can go in polish things up, add some tweeting and see how it all looks. So we'll pause here and up next. We'll add in the remaining contact. Opposes 6. Adding Remaining Contact Points: for this video we're working off of 07 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're going to double click on the walk symbol to go back in, and we're going to create the next contact pose. So the contact poses where we started and what I want to do is take this first contact pose and bring it over to the final frame. Because you can see here, according to this chart, that the contact pose starts where it begins. And that's how we create a loop. This is an easy task. We're just going to come over here to the chad layers, select all of the frames on frame one. So just like this whole in Ault and just drag it over to frame nine. So now we and where we begin just like that, and we're going to also copy these frames and bring them over to five because we need to add in the middle contact pose so we can come up here, select those keys, Alton, drag and bring it over. Now, just like before, we need to do the opposite of what we have. So looking at the contact pose, we just need to swap the limbs. So come in here. We can use the free transform tool. I can bring this one up, but like that again, you're not going to get it exact because of how we have the three force view. But we can just start with this and we'll bring this one back. You put that one like that and then it's kind of ended up a little bit. So let me take a look at this contact post and this one not looking too bad. I do want to make contact, of course, with the ground here, and you can see that the back leg is currently touching the back red line. So this one needs to just come down and touch that blue line just like that. So now we can come up here and swap the arms so this one should be going back. Like so. Of course, you can bring that in a little bit. So let's within the green line here. So just like that, and then for the back bicep, just click on that layer, come in and we can bring it up just like this. You can. So there we go. We now have that contact pose in place, and it's kind of hard to tell right now. But as you can see, we do have all of the pieces in place. It's moving pretty fast, and maybe that's something you'd want. And there are a couple things we need to look at, such as the hair disappearing on a couple frames. But for the most part, with all these pieces, and now we have a foundation which we can use to build up a more polished walk cycle. So we'll pause here and up next. We will keep building this up, add some polish, so that way we can use it in any animation we see fit. 7. Polishing and Reorganizing Keys: for this video we're working off of 08 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. Let's double click to go back into this now. And we're just going to go through and make sure that everything is lining up the way it needs to be. For instance, the feet are on the right lines. That's one thing we want to look at. So let's just do that right now. Taking a look at this contact Post. This is looking pretty good. It's slightly off the line. If that's a huge bother, you can just come in and just bring that in and just make sure it's touching just like that . Go here. It's looking good, also looking good and again, I'm just nitpicking at this point by can just bring it up a tiny bit, and this one isn't quite touching the blue line. It's coming to make sure it is, and that's looking pretty good. Okay, so so far we have a good looking set up here and they're just a couple of the things you want to look at just to make sure everything is going the way it should be going. And it appears For whatever reason, my hair is disappearing on framed too. So let's come down to the back hair and see what this is doing exactly. So we go to the object properties. You can see that it's currently set toe loop and we can come in here and adjust this and this was done for the head turns so you could come in in a justice. However, you wanted to see if the head turned, you could turn it along with everything else. So we want the hair set to frame one, and I'm going to come in here and make sure it's such a single frame. When we go to frame to, you can see that it disappears entirely. And so we want to make sure again that we have this set up so that its frame one single frame and this is something I probably should have looked at before animating because now we got to go through each frame and make sure that it's set up. If he went in and cleared the frames, then the movement of the hair would be off compared to everything else so really quick. We're just going to come in and just make sure that this is set up so that it's not glitch ing out and looking weird. There we are, and we might use this other hair pose if we change the angle of the head, because that's what it was designed for. But we want to make sure that everything is consistent right now with this now the other thing about this is it's a little bit too fast so we can adjust that really quick. Let's just come up here and we're going to grab all of these keys. So just like this, just click holding shift. Now I'm going to select the edge of this. You can see that this yellow line appears and just drag this out. Let's go to frame 20 and release, You can see. Now it's adding even spacing between everything or as best as it can. And if I come back here and hit enter, you can see now that the walk cycle has been slowed down. However, I obviously forgot to put this to single frame on some of these hairpieces here, so I'm just gonna look really quick. Make sure it's set to single frame, cause that's why we had it running. There we go. This one's was not set the single frame. This one was not. That's why it's also important that you said this a single frame, not just frame one and keeping it consistent there. But with everything else, it's come in here and just make sure that's all good to go. Okay, so let's just try that again to make sure. Okay, that's looking better. The hand is also doing its own thing. It looks like at least it waas. Looks like it was just that one frame where it was giving an issue up. No, on a frame 11. We also need a single frame that Okay, let me just make sure. Then we have it work here. Make sure it's single frame. Okay, there we go. So now you have this walk that we are creating here, and it's getting closer to where it needs to be. Now again, at this point, we could use some other things. Speaking of the hair, since we have that hair lined up in good to go now, we could just do some physics here for that, so I want to locate the back hair. So then for instance, when he is moving down unframed three. We could grab this and maybe just rotate it up a little bit. And then when he's on the down pose, cause if we look here, the next one is well, it's called the passing pose. We could leave that as is. And then when it gets to the hypos, come in here and grab the hair. And we could maybe just move that down a little bit and then come back here to contact. We can leave that, as is in the moon. He is moving down a little bit more. Maybe just bring it up and then on the hypos will just come in and we'll do one more on where we just kind of manipulate the hair again. You don't have to, but it might just add a little bit. Mawr physics based motion. To this. You can kind of see that the hairs bobbing up and down now as he does his walk. So from here, if you really wanted Teoh because we have this set up, it's kind of, ah, choppy looking animation. But maybe that's what you want, and you could adjust the spacing and the timing and all that. But you could come back here to see in one right now if you really wanted to. And we could create a looping graphic. And just to make this a little bit easier, I'm just gonna switches to movie clip. So that way I don't have to expand my timeline and then just use control. Enter and you can kind of see how this is starting to pan out. Now, again, this is using no tweeting, but it could work for your purposes if you wanted to go this route. Now, of course, we have some flashing lines here occurring with the walk reference. Which, to quite honest, I'm not sure why it's doing that. Oh, yeah, it's because we have these frames not expanded out all the way. So if we come over here and make sure that walk and limb reference are expanded all the way out to frame 20 that should work for us. But also I'm is going to double click on limb reference and make sure it's set to guide and then come back here to seen one control enter and you can see now that we don't have that issue so we could also go in. And depending on how you had this designed, I'm not sure if I could actually do this, but you could go further if you really wanted Teoh, for instance, with your hair here, it's gonna locate the hair. If I double click on this, I could go in here going here. You see, we have hair here if these strands were separated out, which they're not in this case. But if they were, you could also have them bounce up and down to create mawr physics based movements for the walk action. So there we go. We now have some spacing laid out for this particular animation. And we could work with this if we wanted a more choppy frame by frame looking approach. But we're going to pause here, in, up next. Take a look at what this looks like when we add tweeting to the process 8. Implementing Tweening for Smoother Animation: for this video. I'm working off of 09 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're going to double click on this symbol to go back inside, and we're going to add some twinning to this character just to see how it looks. So first I want to come in here and just to make sure that everything is going to work the way I want it, I'm going to insert keys on frame 20 for all of the Chad pieces. Something's gonna come down here holding shift and then hit F six to create that key. Next, I'll click on head for frame one scroll down, holding shift and click on frame 20 for back hair to select all of these frames, right click, and then I'll choose to create a classic motion Tween. So now you can see we have some motion tweeting down, and if I were to come back, you can see now it animates all that stuff in between. If I were to come back here to seeing one and just use control, enter for this, you can see now that we have this going on now, there's only one slight problem with this, and that is the fact that you can kind of tell that it's repeating frames. It gets to a point, and then it kind of pauses. And then it goes again. Well, what we have to do there is double click to go back into the walk cycle, and we're just simply going to remove frame 20. So come down here. Hold on shift and click on frame 20 for all of the layers, right click and then shoes. Remove frames. So now if I come back to Scene one and we give this another go control enter, you can see now it's smoother, and we're not repeating that frame twice because we had the contact pose at the beginning and end of this. It was the same frame. Therefore, it was repeating twice. That's why you're getting that slight hitch. But by going in and doing what we just did, you can see now that we're able to create a smooth looking animation, and again you don't have to Tween. If you don't want to, you can keep that choppy looking animation. You can put the frames closer or further apart to make it a slower or faster walk cycle. So if I double click and go in here, come down here. And I were to expand this to see frame 35 you can see it's a much slower walk. Now you're gonna have that slight hitch again. Because of the way the keys are being laid down. You would probably have to go back here and add in another key and then remove up until this point. Possibly. But I'm going to keep this at this speed. I had it, which is going to be 19 frames. And again, if you just come back here to the main scene played again, you can see that it's looking pretty good, so we have the loop in place. But how do you actually get it to look like he's walking across the screen? Well, we'll pause here and up next. Take a look at what we can do 9. Testing the Walk Animation Symbol: for this video. We're working off of 10 Chad actions. Feel free to open up this file. We're now going to Tween the character, walking across the screen as he is now in a walk cycle, so we should add some actual movement to him. Now there's a couple things we're gonna have to do to get this toe work because it's not going to be just a simple matter of dragging him across the screen. I'll demonstrate that right now, So let's come in here and create a motion Tween for the Chad symbol on the main scene. So I'm just gonna right click on the Chad symbol and then choose create motion Tween for this. When I do this, you can see it expands my layers out. Not a big deal. We're just going to right click on BG and then choose to insert frame. We don't really need the walk reference right now. In fact, I can just hide it, so that way it's not in the way, and we can resume now. You'll also notice, as I'm paging back and forth, we're not seeing any animation previewing for this symbol, And that's because in the previous video. I was using a movie clip. A movie clip will loop indefinitely no matter what your timeline is doing. So if you only have one frame of animation, but you have animation within a symbol, it aloof. Regardless, however, you cannot preview this screaming back and forth when it's a movie clip. So typically when you animate within animate CC, at least I prefer to use graphic symbols. So that way I know exactly what's going on. I can see it within the editor, and I can choose my actions accordingly. The movie clip is good for me when testing things out like we did in the previous video. I didn't have to add keys to this main seen. I just went in and we saw the loop play out without any mawr building of that scene. With that said, I want to now come in and change this to a graphic, and we're going to make sure, but we start click on this. We're on frame ones. We want to start unframed one, and we do want this one toe loop. So if we come back here now, when we take a look at this, we can see it looping. And if we were to add frames, it'll keep looping and looping and looping. So it just depends on how much time we need for this. And in fact, let me come here to frame 40. I'm just going to hit at five to insert just regular frames. So that way we can kind of get an idea so you can see he's walking just like that. Let's grab him on frame one, and I'm gonna hold on shift in his click and drag to the right. Holding and shift will keep him locked on the X axis, and we'll just bring him back just like that. Now, in frame 40 I could come in and bring him forward, like so all the way. So it looks like he's gonna walk across the screen. You can see we have our keys laid down, and if I come back here and play this out, you can see that he's moving pretty fast compared to what the loop is doing. So that's one consideration you're going to have to make. And that would be Step one in my book is to come in and get this so that this speed is where you want it. So I'm going to just come in and expand this Tween out. Actually, we just do this. You just click and drag on the end of it and you can bring it out just like that so you can bring it out just like this And let me also make sure I have frames for the background, so that way we can see it. So let's just try this again. Now that speed is probably a little bit mawr in line with what we need. Let me just try a little bit Mawr here. I'm actually just gonna bring it out like five more frames and just kind of see how that sets us up. So come back again. And that's probably looking better than it was before. And I would say that's a pretty good speed for what we need. But now you have to go back and start looking at some different aspects of this. For instance, let's just bring it here when he's walking. And don't mind the backgrounds. I know that doesn't make sense that you stepping on that part of background, but when he's walking here, you can see that his feet kind of float. So when he steps down like this on frame 22 he should remain stationary until this foot comes up and steps down to propel him to the next point. It doesn't make much sense that right now that he's like skating on this foot as an example . So if you come down here, we can see it starting right there as well. Kind of slides forward. So on frame six, I'm is going to click on him and take my arrow keys and destroyed a nudge him back a bit. So we're just gonna keep going here. Could see. Is moving a little bit. Still, it's coming here, Move it back a little bit more. Getting closer. There we go. That's starting to look a little bit better. Maybe just a few more frames back or a few more clicks back. Rather, that's not looking too bad, but you can see now it looks like he's kind of pivoting on that foot, and then we propelled forward and then we're going to step down and it's gonna be the same thing here. So what we could do to make sure that we're locked down here and we're not messing with this is I'm just going to use my up arrow and go up and then down that just establishing a key frame right there, as you can see, and then we just kind of leave it there, and we're just gonna come in here now and do the same thing. We're just gonna move this back to try to manipulate what's going on here. So because forward steps down and we're gonna go and step down here, So there really shouldn't be too much floating right there either. So we're just going to establish a key right there, End. Just move him back a little bit. That looks a little better. And actually, we should probably keep that to this point. So it looks like he's sort of the stationary there as the action goes through. Here we go. So right about here, we could also just it started key and on frame 34 it's gonna kick him back a little bit, a little bit too much. Somebody's gonna bring him forward slightly. There we go. It's just Let's just take a look at this so far to make sure that it's and you can see there's a little bit of, ah, speed issue there. He seems like he's kind of going faster than he should be. I think it actually has to do with this right here. I was gonna have kicking back a little bit and kicking back a little bit right there. Number number. Getting a little bit closer with it. Okay, so we're starting here and again. He might be going a little too fast rate there, so I could actually just come in to get back just a little bit. And here we're looking at the back foot for this or rather, the front foot. Just trying to get that pivot. So it's a little bit more natural. There we go. And then here, it's gonna kick that back a little bit more. He's floating a little bit and a huge deal again. Just couldn't come back like that. The rear and we could keep going with this for as long as we feel it's needed. It's kind of examining all the frames here just to make sure And yet, from here we would just not having a go a Sfar forward as he is. In fact, we'll probably go to that frame and just kind of kick him back a little bit. Can see how this looks. Okay, So as you can see, I probably won't do until the end of the screen because I think hopefully by now you can get the idea of how this should work. But coming in here, there are some things I could adjust just the kind of help with the motion of it. For instance, when his foot goes back like that, I feel like maybe we should just kind of commit and knock that back a little bit. Maybe not that one back a little bit, looking a little bit better again. You have a little bit of variation of speed right here. Can it starts fast. You kind of slows down, actually, right here should be a little bit of a gap like that as well. Getting closer. There's just that little speed up right here, which we don't really need. Just kind of take him back a little bit like that. You just little bit like this there that's looking a little better. And again I could keep manipulating it and playing with it. But ultimately you just want to pay attention to the feet, and you want to make sure that everything looks ground and nothing looks like it's floating . You can kind of see this little bit of a float right there as an example. So maybe you, like, just come in and knock that back a little bit. And it's just a matter of just manipulating it and getting it to the right speed and making sure it looks grounded within the scene. Now, another thing you could dio, because, let's say, for instance, you find this whole process to be a pain in terms of having to go through every time and adjust the spacing in the speed of your walk. Once you have it on the stage, you could come in and make this whole thing a symbol as well if you wanted to, and one easy way to do that would be to come over here and right click on the chad layer and copy layers, and I can go up to insert new symbol, and we could name this one Chad walk and then maybe right to left. We could make it a graphic and then click OK and then we just paste this layer into that and we can just remove that other layer layer one. We don't need that so that we can come back here to the scene. And let's just hide this animation really quick. I'm gonna create a new layer and we can come over to the library, which is right down here. And then we have the Chad walk left to right animation and we could put that onto the stage just like that and means So we put him over there or wherever we want. You can see now. We could put this in so that the animation is within this symbol. And if we ever need him toe walk, left to right, weaken simply. Just grab that Chad left to right, walk action and put him in. On the other hand, let's say we have a scrolling background and he's just walking and we want him right in the center of the screen and we want the background to move instead of him to simulate the camera is following him as he walks. Well, then you could go in and just grab your Chad walk animation right there, and maybe we should rename this one to Chad Walk stationary. That way it's all explicit, and then you have Chad walk left to right, and to organize us even more, you could put the chad walk left to right into the walk folder. So that way you have to different walk cycles that you could use one that stationary, one that's moving left to right. You could mere that one and have it also go left to right. You could also continue into different types of walks. You could do more confident walks. You could do maybe a sulking walk. There's lots of things you can dio, and ultimately it's going to come down to your own production and what you need to convey the emotions. So with all that said, I think this walk cycle portion is complete. We might come back and revisit some things like how to do blinks in how to add voices and sinking miles to an action like this. But that will come a little bit later if we do go down that route. Hopefully, right now, though, you have a good understanding of how you can animate with symbols as well as creating walk cycle because up next. We're going to jump in and do something similar. It's gonna be a run cycle, but run cycles are a little bit different, and I think it will be just as fun to play around with. 10. Exporting Your Walking Animation: once you're satisfied with your animation and you would like to share it with the world, you can always go up to file export and then choose export video or media. Now you have other options. If you want to export an animated GIF, you could as well. Or if you do movie, you can export out a swift file. But here we actually want to export out a video. That way, it's easy to share, such as on YouTube or Vimeo, or just to share with a friend or family member. So we'll go ahead and choose export video slash media. Here, you can choose the render size as well as if you want Alfa channels if you want to export out the entire movie, and if you want to use a certain format as well. So you have quite a few options here. I'm going to leave the render size at what we had it when we designed this, which was 10 80 p. We don't have to do anything with the Alfa Channel. I'm going to export out the entire movie and we can skip down to here. Then the format will be H 0.264 As you can see, you can choose from a wide range of formats. Age 0.264 isn't easy to share format, so we're just going to go with that as well as the default a m e. From here, we can choose where we want to export this out. I'm going to choose to export it out into the project files for this class. So that way you can access this video if you wish. And then once you're good, you can choose export and then it will go through the process and start exporting out. Now, there is one caveat to this. You can use adobe media encoder to help you with the rendering of this. So I would recommend that you also have this turned on. So what's going to happen is once you hit export, it's going to create a dot m o. V file from animate. And then it's going to open up media encoder. So if we come over here, we can see that media encoders actually already opened and it went through an export of this out. It actually happened so fast we didn't get to see it, But you're getting a confirmation right here saying that, Hey, it worked out. So from here, we could go to the exercise files and play that video out if you wish. Or you could bring the video into a video editor, share it with a friend, whatever you want to do or export it out and share it with us. Because again, it be awesome to see what you came up with while falling along with this class. 11. Conclusion: So there you go. You now have a character rigged up and walking from here. You can save this animation and reuse it at any time. You can open it back up and perhaps add some more personality to the walk. Perhaps the character is angry or more carefree. You can do all that now with the foundation set and play around and become really creative with your animation. And also, if you followed along with me up to this point, I would love to see the walk cycle you created, and I'm sure the other classmates would like to see it as well. Sharing work like that could be very inspirational. Trigger new ideas and overall just helps build a community knowing that you are not alone when it comes to learning these new materials. So great job. I hope you had fun. Please feel free to share your work and I'll see you next time