Animate a Walk Cycle

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Today, I want to show you how I animate the walk cycle from a side view like this one. My name is Sykosan, I am a French animator and illustrator with 15 years of experience, and I'm based in London. Together, we'll have a look at how to create key frames with a very simple stick figure. Then, we will add a second class of key frames of secondary animation. Then, we'll add the remaining parts of inbetween for smooth animation. Finally, I will apply these principles to a more complex character. This class is suitable for artists who are already familiar with an animation app. Really, any app will do but I'll use Photoshop. If you want to know more about the animation tools in Photoshop, then check out my previous lessons. Once you have followed this class, I would love to see you animate your own walks cycle. So please, share it with me and feel free to hashtag me hashtag #Sykosan. So let's get started [MUSIC]. 2. Key Frames: Welcome to my class. We'll start with the key frames. For walk cycle, there are only four essential key frames. Actually, we really only need two key frames. The other two are just symmetrical. If you know how to get those two frames right, you should have a great looking walk cycle. Let me show you how. Okay, let's get started. We're going to have an animation based on, let's say, 24 frames per second, that's standard rate for cinema and animation. Although the animation itself would probably be animated on twos. By the end of this on twos that means that every frame is [inaudible] for two frames to get 24. That makes the animation roughly 12 frames per second. But when we start the keyframes, which we'll do now, we're going to have maybe three frames per second. So one frame every eight frames. Then we're going to start in-betweening and smoothing out the animation. So those first four keyframes are pretty easy to do. I've got a timeline setup. My timeline frame rate is three frames per second. I've already got some frames here ready to draw on. I'm going to get started. I'm going to draw a very simple stick figure. The first thing I'm going to do maybe is have line full of flow, just to say where the flow is. Something like that. That first character is going to be really simple. I'm going to draw a stick-man with maybe some little circles for the articulations. I'm going to draw the front line and the side of the character that is close to us. I'm going to draw it with a thick line and the other side with a thinner line so we can differentiate the front and the back. In this first part of this class, we're going to just animate this little stick man, but by the end of it, I'll just redo everything with more detailed character to just see how it works effectively. We're going to have a simple character with let's say a square face. Squared like this. I'm going to try to keep it tidy simple. To see the head movements later on, the hat has a little wobble as we walk. That wobble of the head would be good to be made more obvious with maybe a hat or something. I'm going to give him a cap just like this. I'm just going to draw this and that just should do. I will add a [inaudible] and maybe a ponytail or something. That will add also some secondary animation that will be interesting to the look at. I'm just going to have maybe something like this. That'll be at the back of the head. Since this first series of keyframes, the head, wobble, and the ponytail, animations are not going to be detailed at all. This will be the second part of this class. First, we want to just block out and remain the most important keyframes. For the body, something very simple like I said. I'm going to start with the first key frame actually. The first key frame I'm interested in, is the the full extension of the legs. The moment when the legs are furthest apart, the character is like this. That's what I'm going to draw here. The arms and the legs obviously are crossed in different directions. I'm going to draw the shoulders here, for example. Then maybe the front side of the body will be here, the backside of the body will be here. I'm going to thicken this line like so, keep the other one thin. The top of the body, as you can see, twists one side while the bottom of the body twists the other side. That's because the arms go one way and the legs go the other way. This suggests that if this is the hip and the front, the leg is at the front like this and then extend the leg. The foot is not going to be flat on the floor yet, it's just got contact with the floor. It's going to be slightly like this. At the back, the leg will be extended. Let's say the foot is just starting to get off the floor like this. So this is the front leg. I'm going to make this one thicker. Right in front of me, that means it's closer to us, people are looking. I'm going to indicate where the knee is, somewhere in the middle here. On the back I'm just going to put a little circle here, little circle there. Now the arms. I'm going to put some more circles here and there. There you go. The arms are going to be relaxed. They extend in the same way as the legs, but maybe with a bit of a delay. I'm just to put them in this position for now. Like this and like this. Now, I'm going to draw the hands. Just some little articulations. There you go. Dot for the hand, same for the front. Something like this. Here we go. You can see the arm here on this side going to the back, the leg going to the front. For the leg, this is pretty much the furthest the leg goes on either side. The arm will keep swinging on the next frame. So you'll see. The next thing, I'm going to do the next frame. I'm going to keep this in the background so I can see, and I'm just going to draw things slightly different. This is the full extent and the next one will be basically the frame that is right in the middle when that [inaudible] and maybe that important part. Instead of being fully at the front, we'll be right in the middle here. The interesting thing about the next frame is that this foot will not be in the middle, not just yet. It will sort of lag somewhere here at the back. You'll see when I get to it. So I'm just going erase this. All right. Let's draw the next frame. I'm going to bring in some transparency here just so I can see my character slightly. Here we go. In this case, the front leg is going underneath now. It's going to be somewhere like here, and the foot, that's the important part. The foot needs to be right in the middle. The leg will be bent because the character goes down a little bit at this point. Instead of drawing the whole full character down a bit, I'm just going to draw on top of the existing character, and then that's going to move it down a bit. So I'm going to just draw that over the head again like this. Keep everything the same, ponytail as well, the neck. At this point I'm going to slightly keep the shoulder moving forward and while the arm moves backwards. So this is what happens. The shoulder moves forward a little bit, just a tiny bit. Pretty much stays in the same place. Even if you kept it in the same place, it would be fine. I'm just going to move it slightly forward while the arm keeps swinging back, like this. Same as the back of the body and the arm keeps swinging forward a little bit. This will give a nice pace to the arms. You'll see. Then here the hips starts going slightly back. So it's a bit like the shoulders. I'm going to place the knees somewhere here and foot. So that line here, front line, goes something like this. I'm giving a bit of a bend because the body is not perfectly straight. This is purely aesthetic. You can draw it straight if you want. Then the back leg goes the same, it starts moving forward. But instead of the foot is not actually going right in the middle yet. So you will sort of drag it a little bit like this. This is not based on a lot of science because in my experience, this is how I approach doing a walk cycle. You can deviate a little bit from these rules if you feel like it. If you want to give a different personality to the walk. But this is how I approach usually a walk cycle. I'm going to draw this other line I'm missing here, shoulders. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take the whole upper part of the body, move it down a bit, because the body is going down on this keyframe. I'm going to take all this and move it down. [inaudible]. Now if someone walks very leisurely or slowly, the up and down movement could be barely visible. You could barely ignore it completely. If someone has a firm walk and then just a long stride, let's say, then the up and down movement is normal, accentuated. I'm going for a proper walk, someone who is walking with some determination. I'm just going to fix those lines a little bit down here. Let me draw this a little bit. Okay. You know what, once you got this, you have worked out most of your animation already, because the other two keyframes that we need, we need four. Because this is a side view, they just flipped. The back and the front of the character are just flipped. So whatever lines are at the back at the moment, the thin lines will be flipped with thick lines and that's it. I'm going to draw the new keys by just drawing over this existing drawing and changing which one is at the front and which one is at the back, and that's it. I'm going to have my four keyframes pretty much sorted for my animation. You'll see that this is enough to convey someone walking. So I'm just going to go draw these other frames quickly. [MUSIC]. So here I'm just drawing this line which is in front. I'm going to draw this line much thinner, and this one of the back, I'm going to draw it thick as if it were at the front. [MUSIC] Okay. So this is it. We have our first four keyframes. It looks maybe a little confusing now with all these lines crossing over. But I can tell you this is all you need. You've got already everything you need for the animation to be clearly defined. Now we're going to add, after this, a set of other keyframes. Basically, we're going to in-between those frames. We're going to do some changes so that we can incorporate a little bit of secondary animation, like the wobble of the head or the movement of the ponytail, for example, and have some subtlety about the way the feet hit the floor, get off the floor and things like this. This is for the next video. [MUSIC] 3. Secondary Animation: Great. We have our main keyframes. Now we will detail this animation and add the second pass of frames. This is the step where we can start adding some secondary animation, such as the head wobble, or some hand movement for example. Let's get to it. Let's add a second passive keyframes. So I'm going to basically do some in-betweens, and then I'm going to tweak those in-between to add some interesting secondary animation. So I've already changed the frame rate from three frames per second to six frames per second, and I've added a frame between each of the keyframes, so here's my first key frame and then I got a blank and then the second key frame and then the blank et cetera. I want to place myself here between the first two key frames. I'm going to put my onion skin on, here we go, and I've got this little layer here to color them in a little bit. Anyway, I can see in purple here my third key frame and in green the second key frame. I'm just going to go ahead and start drawing. I want to start with the head and for these new four key frames that we're going to add, I want to emphasize the fact that the walk when we go up and down like this, we don't go regularly up and now, instead, spend a bit more time at the top and be less at the bottom, be like a bouncy ball, it goes boom, boom, boom. So we spend more time at the top. So when we draw these in-betweens, we need to draw them closer to the top keyframe. So instead of joining here, for example, instead of drawing just a straight line here, right in the middle, for example, between two lines of the cap, I'm going to draw this line a little bit closer to the red here, just underneath and I'm going to do this for the whole body, and then the arms and the legs have their own movement we'll get it. So I'm going to do this for the hands, I'm going to draw everything slightly up. Another way to do this is maybe to actually simply draw over one of the frames, so I'm going to draw over the purple frame like this. That's easy and then I'm going to move this little bit down just like this. Instead of putting it right in the middle here, I'm just going to put it closer to the top frame. If I do this for every one of the single [inaudible] I'm going to draw now, you will get that little bounce as the character walks. I'm going to do the same for the shoulders and the hips. Here I'm going to draw a line a little bit high up here, I want to position that closer to the top position. Same here. Now let's look at the arms. So the arms go into the extreme position and they slow down. Again, I don't want to draw this in-between right in the middle. I don't want to do this, for example, I don't want to put this point right in the middle and this point right in the middle and draw the line right in the middle. It works, but try there be more subtlety than [inaudible] nice if we could feel like the arm is slowing down as it gets to the extreme position, the green position here. What I would suggest is that we draw again the new line, the new in-between closer to the green and further from the purple one, so I'm going to do this like this. See I stay closer to the green line and this will create what we call an ease out. Animation is slowing down as it gets to the extreme position, same here I'm going to position this here for example, instead of right in the middle, it'd be closer to the green. On the shoulder side I'd say, it's the same idea you get closer to the extreme. Here's the opposite, the extreme is the purple one in this case. So I'm going to be closer to the purple one and that's [inaudible]. Then I draw this line, and then this line, this line, this one thicker. Now I've got all these points I can join these. Don't forget the neck. Okay, now the legs. So there's some funny things that can happen with the legs, particularly with the knee, which can have a quite complex movement. So as this front leg hits the flow and bends, of course the foot will go back, the foot will go right in the middle because the flow is moving at a constant pace. So the foot will be right in the middle somewhere here. But while the knee has to let some room for the leg to bend, the knee will not go right in the middle. If you draw it at right in middle, it will look weird. It's not because of easing in and out in this case is because the dynamic of the leg, it has to flex, flex like this and this flexing pushes the knee out. It can push out even further than it was in this. So you could be the case where your knee for example, is still quite further out like this. That's important, it gives you the feeling that really there's a snap of the knee there, it's the flow and just absorbs the weight of the character. I'll start with that, here we go at the back here. I think it's the same idea with the arms, the extended position first key frame. We're going to stay closer to that one, just because the leg was in an extreme position is the accelerating. So if we put it right in the middle, it will look a bit to linear. I'm going to put this one somewhere closer to the purple line like so because I'm going from the purple line to the green line here. Then I'm going to put my foot somewhere closer again to the purple one, something like this. There we go In animation, keeping in mind is easing in and out of positions, really gives a smooth feeling to the animation. That's why sometimes when you are in-between, a voyage is putting things right in the middle of two frames. I'm happy with this one. Let's move on to the next. Again, the purple one this time is still the frame before the green one is the time afterwards. If we look at the front leg here, it's moved quite a lot here, and the arms are moving quite a lot as well. The purple goes from this position to this position. There's a lot of movement in this particular transition. Whereas the head is the same idea as before. We're going to stay closer to the highest frame. I'm going to start with the head just like before. I'm staying close to this time it will be the green that's the highest point. I could just do this. Again, you could do as we did before. You could just trace one of the two frames, and then move it. Well all this time trying to stay closer to the top position. I'm happy with that. Now the shoulders, in this particular position, I think because the body's changing completely from being crossed one way to cross the other way, we can draw the frames for the rest of the body exactly in the middle. That's fine. In this particular case, there is no acceleration or deceleration. We can draw in-between right in the middle for the rest of the body. Except for the shoulders and the hips, we're going to stay still closer to the top position. This dot here goes from here to here, so it moves a lot. It moves all the way this way. This one goes from here to here. It's going to be somewhere here. Over here, this one moves from here to there. Its going to be somewhere here. This one from here to there. It's going to be somewhere here. We can draw those lines in the middle. From the side view of the body, now looks quite flat. I'm happy with that. I'm going to draw the arms. The arm that's closer to us goes from this position on the right to this position on the left. It traveled a lot. It's worth remembering that often things move with a knock. The line like for example, this elbow is moving from here to here through probably not like this, and same for the hands, but we're moving from here to here through a knock like this. You want to keep that in mind when you draw in-betweens. I just leave those. I'm going to position this one somewhere here, and this one somewhere here. This is the front arm, something like this. The arm back will be somewhere like this. There we go. Everything is getting together now. The front leg is coming from this position here to this position there. It's pushing right. It's going from fully flex to fully extended. I drew the hip here. The knee, lets put it somewhere in the middle here. The foot will be right in the middle somewhere here. That's it. You can just join. The next one will be the leg at the back, which goes from [inaudible] this position here to this position there. Again, this is another strange in-between. This one must not be drawn right in the middle. The knee leads the foot in this case, and the foot needs to be bent so that the foot doesn't drag on the floor. In fact, the knee will go pretty much close to the extreme position already, while the foot is still lagging behind. I'm going to draw that really close to its new position here. It's going from here to here. Instead of being in the middle here, I'm just drawing all the way there. While the foot which goes from here to here will be dragging on the back, so I'm thinking I'm going to do it like this. There you go. It needs to be bent so that I can go forward without touching the floor. The knees slightly forward and the foot slightly backwards. This is good. I'm happy with this key again. Now, we go another two key frames to do, of course, for the rest of the movement. But again, it's the same idea exactly the two symmetrical. I'm just going to go ahead, and draw those. This is it. We have first key frames and then our first pass secondly key frames. But this is not it just yet. I want to add some secondary animation. Like I mentioned before, I would like to have the head wobble a little bit and maybe the pointytail wobble a little bit. There's no much to do. We'll have a look at that really quickly. It's pretty simple. I am going back between the first two key frames. It will be this one. That's when the head starts going down. I want to make sure you see that. It starts going down and then goes down further, then goes up and up further. Basically, every time it's in the middle, between the top and bottom position, we're going to just take the head a little bit and we'll take the head a bit so that the front of the cap has a bit of delay. When it goes down, the cap goes up. When the head goes up the cap goes down. Now, we'll give a little bit of a wobble like this on the head. It's just a subtlety, but it makes the animation look a bit more like it has weight and it feels be more realistic. I'm going to take that first in-between there we've done, and because it's going down, I'm going to move cap up a little bit. I want to just show the file before and after again. We're going to select the head on this. I will rotate it just around the middle somewhere like here. A little bit just so that maybe go just above. How much is that? That's five degrees. Maybe you can keep that in mind 4-5 degrees. Maybe that's a good value for the head wobble every time you're going to do this. It's going to be four, five degrees one way or the other. It goes up a little bit, and then want to go, the head goes fully down, and now it's starting to go back up again. I want to see the cap go the other way for the delay, so the cap goes down a bit. I'm grabbing all this, and this time, the cap goes down like this, the head. Again, I'm going to do this for the next two as well. This one will go up. Next one, this one will go down. Now let's play it again. See what that looks like. Can you see this? It's nice to see that the weight of the head going up and down. Finally, the other thing that we can do is maybe try to keep some augmented to our ponytail. This is the same idea. We can go going to key frame to see what the ponytail should do. There's going to be emitted the ponytail will be a bit more complex. To be fairly so far soft material like, let's say it could be okay, it could be a scarf or something else that moves in the wind, we can have a life of its own, but also it's more of a personal field with this, but we're going to try to keep it settles line not too extreme and in line with the pace of the walk. Same idea is the cap. There was a bit of delay. The ponytail will go up and down with ability like competitive woke person. So getting back to this one. Now observe that goes down, like this. If it goes down the ponytail, may still be doing up from the movement from before. I'm just going to slyly ritual is ponytail as if it was just going up like this cylinder. You see? Because we were going up, now the head started going down. The ponytail will continue going up for a little bit. Let's say it looks like this. Then the next one, I'm going to use the onion skin. The part of the ponytail you see that's attached to the head always follows the head for the back, further back way from the head, its go that further ponytail is delayed. I'm going to keep the part is close to the head where it is, the back of the ponytail was so start flipping a little bit, like this, for example. Then when you start going back up again, the ponytail will flap down again and push your head pulls up, the silver forces like a whiplash impact forces that ponytail to go down further and quicker. I'm just going to change that creates a little bit to make it look like it's going further down to even where It is now. As we keep going up, the head points out, so it goes back to normal. Then next time it keeps going up again, so we're doing the same psycho preimage twice. I'm going to Just play it, see what it looks like for now. How for the animation is doing something and the other off the animation as it was before. So you see what happens here. You can see the movement in one step is fine, the other one becomes rigid again. That's why the secondary animation. It not the level of animation that solve other pace with main animation. If you get that thing right, again, he adds weights, to things. It gives you a sense of realism, a satisfying to look at. I'm just going to do the other frames, the same idea. Again, because this is organic, there's a certain amount of freedom that you can have p[laying with this, you don't have to be extremely precise. The hair can bounce around quite a bit. If you're not super precise, but may not be a problem, it's forgiving in that way. Let me continue. Let's have a look. Quite nice. Actually in while, the hair could actually move forward as it flaps on the back. Thing to try to add this, you see. Right now it looks like it's a misstep stare at the bottom movement. They could swing back to the front of the towards the head. We can try that. Here I'm thinking here it could be like this. You could actually flip this way to the front of the head and here as well. This is again my feeling, how you feel it, and amount of experiences as well. Let's see what this looks like. This nice, I like that. When you're happy with this looks. This is it for main key frames and the secondary key frames for the secondary animation. Now we've got all the information that is needed. This character really is walking. It's copays, it go wait. This is looking good. I'm really happy with this. The next phase, if you want to have a smooth animation, is to add another set in-between. We have 8 frames right now. This will take it to double that, so 16 frames. We'll have a very smooth animation, 12 frame for secondary. I'm going to do next. 4. Inbetweens: Fantastic. We've done the hard part. Now we can move on to adding the final in-betweens to get a perfectly smooth animation. I'm now going from six frames per second to 12 frames per second, and it's time to add some in-betweens and make this look smooth. I've already done my timetable, I've got a timeline, sorry. I've got empty blank frames between each frame. It looks like this now, and I'm just going through the in-betweens. Quite frankly, there's not much to this. Now it's pretty easy, you can draw some in-between, traditional in-betweens, just linear and that should work nicely. You can still, if you want, try to keep thinking about easing in and out the keys, but, at this point, I think it all looks smooth nonetheless. I'm just going to go ahead and start with the first one. I'm going to bring in the one in skin like this, and here we go. I'm going to just draw this first one, just banging them everywhere. Here, I'm going to push down and slightly outside. Like I mentioned before, the simple fact that the foot hits the floor, it creates that bend in the knee right away that pushes them even further than it was before. So I think this is a good example, the foot should be probably flat right here, but the knee will be moving forward like this, and it will create a little movement of the knee that actually feels real and it gives weights to the character again. This is the first in-between. I'm just going to keep going. Again, here we have this knee-thing, and this is different, this is before the impact. We have a similar case where the knee can reach further than the leg. So before the leg can extend fully, the knee needs to move forward enough so that the bottom of the leg, the foot can swing into position and full forward to not hit the floor when it swings into position. The knee needs to be higher up and allow the leg to swing, put swing into position and then go back down and contact with the floor. That means that you have this weird position where the knee, instead of being right in the middle of these two key frames, you could put it in the middle of [inaudible]. That would be okay. If you want to be a little bit picky, you can push the knee as far as here. Then put the foot somewhere, actually, it would be nice to be pretty closer to the moment when you will be fully extended. Something like this. So this movement will look more natural again. I'm being just picky here, I'm looking at details. It's not absolutely necessary. But if you can get that right, it will look good. Okay, I'll continue. Here we go. There you have it, a character in-between a walk cycle. I think now it looks very smooth on 25 seconds. As you can see, I've done pretty much linear in-between everywhere here for this last pass, some in-betweens, except for that little knee-thing. If you look at that little from knees, I've got this little jerky movement, which is actually what happens in reality. We have this over. It's not a nice linear movement of the knee. The knees will go forward, goes back, forward again and back again. It's very complex movement here that you can just sense in this animation, and I think it helps keep weight to the character. In the next video, I would like to apply the same ideas to a more complex character. All I'm going to do is just do everything the same, but I'm just going to start with a character that's designed with some details, with the face. Maybe the same character, a female character with the cap and the ponytail, but with much more details. This is what we're going to do next. I just want to do this to show you that principles apply to more complex characters. 5. Applying Those Tips: That's it. We have a beautiful walk cycle. How about we now use those same principles to animate a more complex character. Let's do this. I've got same status before ,I've Columbus with animation timeline that's set to three frames per second. I'm going to start by drawing four key face of my character. I don't know what the character is going to be like yet, but I'm just going to go ahead and draw something and then I'm going to animate it. This is it, this is the character I'll be animating. After scrapes it one frame for now. I'm going to create it the other three key frames. Again with the same idea, so the second key frame is going to be when the foot is right in the middle here, and she's on the lower position and I'm going to keep the swinging of the arms in that position, and the back foot going to be just lagging a little bit like I did before. Then I'm going to create another two keyframes. Just flip them in. Basically the front and back of the cartoon is going to be changed. It's going be easy and pretty much trace it and just redraw a few things. After that, we're going to go on to adding the second pass of keyframes with the secondary animation. But first, let's create these four keyframes. This is it, this is the animation. Just the key frames. I think this is looking pretty good, far. Next, I just want to add the possible in-betweens. On the second possible in-betweens, I'm going to add some secondary animation, particularly on the head wobble and the ponytail. All right lets do this. Now I have those extra key frames, but I have yet to add the secondary animation. I'm going to add this wobble to the head and the ponytail. Let's continue. Here is with a bit of secondary animation. You can see that the head wobble and the ponytail animated. I'm quite happy with the way this looks. Next I think we should just add some in-betweens. I'm going to spare you the recording of the in-betweens, because it's quite repetitive. I now will jump straight through to the in-between versions. Here we go. This is it. We have the final completed animation with the in-betweens. I've placed the animation next to stick figure animation, so you can see the similarities. I've basically used the same process, obviously, it takes a bit more attention to details when you join a more detailed character, but the idea is exactly the same, have the same original two key frames, and then flipped symmetrically. Then I just created a second pass of in-betweens, adding a bit of delay or and that secondary animation on the head and the hair. Yes, everything is there. I have this little flip of the knee as well at the front when the foot contacts with the floor at the front. This is a tiny detail again, they don't honestly need to do, but I wanted to have that in there. Basically those two animations are the same, they're just different level of details. I hope this will be useful for you. There are different ways to approach MOOC cycles, but this is the way I do. I think it's, it's pretty effective. Because you really just need to nail down those two original key find, pretty much have done most of the work away. Eager, I would love to see what you guys do with this tips. 6. Conclusion and extras: Congratulations on completing this course. I hope you've learned a thing or two about animating a walk cycle. Again, I invite you to create your own walk cycle. Also, keep watching this video for some extra footage. I'll see you at the next lesson.