Transcripts
1. Course Trailer: Hey, I'm Jake Bartlett, and this is part two of Animating with Character, where I'm going to show you my workflow for animating walk cycles in After Effects. A walk cycle is one of the most fundamental things you need to know how to do, when animating characters and it's one of my favorite types of animations. For the class project, you'll be animating a walk cycle yourself. If you want to use your own character, and you haven't taken part one, go check out that class where I showed you how to design, and prep your artwork, and rig it in After Effects for animation. Or if you don't want to design your own character, you can use one of mine. I'll be providing my fully rigged After Effects projects along with the source artwork for you to download, and use. So let's get started. I'll see you in class.
2. Getting Started: Walk cycles are one of my favorite types of animations. It can be extremely intimidating once you see how much has to go into it. But the more you practice, the better you'll get at it, the quicker you'll realize what works and what doesn't, and you'll be on your way to making unique walk cycles for your own characters. Every character rig is going to have a different way of animating a walk cycle, but you can use the framework that I present in my own characters, and modify it to fit your own. In this class, I'm going to show you how I animated all three of my characters walks. I'd really encourage you to watch all the videos before you decide to start animating your own character just so you can get an idea of what the different possibilities and limitations are before you get too far along in the process. I think one of the best ways to get better at animating walk cycles is repetition. Watching me animate multiple walk cycles is a great way to start. If you took the first part of this class and you have your own character rig, then you're all set. But if you're here just for the walk cycles, and you need a character rig, go check out the project description page. At the bottom of that page you'll see the attachments that contain all of my source artwork for my three characters along with the project files of them fully animated. That way you can take a look at my project files and see how I actually built them. Once you have everything you need to start, take a deep breath because this is going to be some pretty heavy stuff. But if you follow along, I promise that you'll be animating walk cycles in no time. Remember that if at any point you have any questions, go ahead and ask me on the Ask Me Anything thread on the community page. I'm happy to clear up anything that you're confused by or have questions about.
3. Get Inspired!: To get inspired, I put together a Pinterest board with lots of different walk cycles. So take a look at the link in the notes of this video right now to find inspiration for your own walk cycle. If you just take a look through these, you'll see that there's so many different ways of animating somebody walking, and that just based on the way that they walk, communicates a lot about how they're feeling and what their personality is like. All right, let's move on and start animating.
4. The Contact Pose: So here we are with Trevor and he's already late for a meeting. All my controls are set. I can move around his limbs, I can move them up and down, rotate him, everything's working properly. I've already saved this project as a duplicate and named it Trevor Walk V1. That way if I ever need to I can go back to my rig without any animation applied. But even within this project, I'm going to start by duplicating this comp and renaming it Trevor Walk. Then I'll open that up so that I have just another level of backup to get back to my original rig, close that won out and I'm ready to get started. Now the way that I generally approach a walk cycle is very planned out, very controlled. The nice thing about it being controlled is that there are steps to take to get you from a rig to a walking character. Now I'll show you my process for animating walk cycles for all three of my characters. As you'll see, each one of them takes a unique approach because they each have their own body proportions, there own set of controls in their own personalities. The way that a character walks can tell you so much about their personality, and you can express a lot of emotion just by the weigh that they're walking. There's no limit to how a character can walk. For Trevor, I'm going to do a very basic casual stroll just to give you an idea of how to do a basic walk. If you want to do something a bit more stylized, you absolutely can, but if this is your first time doing character animation, I'd say it's probably a good idea if you just follow along with what I'm doing, then you can start to play around with the different poses and come up with your own unique walk cycle. Check out the Pinterest boarded that I put on the class project description for a ton of amazing walk cycles by different animators. Let's start animating Trevor. The first thing I want to do is set keyframes for my neutral values. I'm going to select All of my properties, hold down option and press P to set a position keyframe for all of those layers, then all these select the eyes and I'll set a rotation keyframe for all the other controllers. The reason deselected the eyes is because they can't rotate, just move around. Then I'll press E on the COG to reveal the Hare rotation effect and I'll set a keyframe there, and that should be all the properties that I need to animate. So deselect by clicking down here and press U to collapse and U one more time to bring up all the keyframes I just set. Then I'll hold down Option and Command or Alt and Control on a PC, and click on the keyframes to convert them to hold keyframes. That way there will be no animation between these keyframes and the next keyframes I set. Now if I move forward and start animating over hear in my timeline, I can always come back to my neutral values which we will be doing. It's very important that you do this step. Then I'll move to frame 20, and this is where I'm going to set the first pose for this walk cycle. There are four mane poses that make up this walk cycle. Contact, passing, up, and down. Those are the extreme poses. First, let's start with contact. Contact is when his legs are going to be spread out furthest. If I spread his legs out right now, they'd bee stretched out, and I want to try to avoid that throughout my entire walk cycle. First I need to just drop hymn down. I'll grab the COG controller, which if you remember stands for center of gravity and that's attached right here at his hips. I'll just tap the down Arrow key a few times until his knees bend just a little bit. Then I'll see how far forward I can pull his leg before it straightens out. So right there it snaps. If I look over here at the position, I've got about 200 pixels on the X. I wanted to be a little bit further than that, so I'm going to grab the COG again, drop them down a few more, and then pull that leg out even further. Right there, it snaps. To make this whole process much cleaner and simpler to look at I'm going to round this off to 300, just going to type that in and his leg is still a little bit stretched. I'll grab that COG and just tap it down, just one click on the keyboard and that was enough to bend his knee. So 300 pixels out, that way, let's see how far back we need to pull this leg until it snaps right about there. If I bring it in just a little bit, that's actually right around negative 300. I'll round that off as well and we've got a little bit of bend in both legs. That works just great. If you took the rigging course, you'll remember that if I move the controller around, it controls his entire arm and his hand automatically rotates based on the position of the arm. This whole system is called IK or inverse kinematics. It's extremely helpful for certain types of animations. But if I come over to the effects controls, you might remember that we had this thing called FK and underneath there we can disable the IK. If I check that, the arm goes straight and if I move the controller around, nothing happens with the arm. Instead of driving the arm with this controller, I have these two controls for rotating the parts of the arm. So we've got the upper FK which rotates at the shoulder, and we've got the lower FK which rotates at the elbow. Then if I rotate the controller that still rotates the hand. Really this just mirrors at standard parent chain if I weren't to have used Duik to rig this arm. But because I use Duik, I have the option to enable or disable this IK system at any point in my animation. But for this particular walk cycle, I can just leave it disabled and it'll be easier to animate the arms using this FK system. I'm going to zero these rotations back out. Since this is disabled, I can actually get rid of the position keyframes that I had set for the hands. Because the position of these controllers don't actually affect the arms anymore, I can even disable them so that they're not covering up my arms. What I do need to do is go back to that first frame and set keyframes for both the upper and lower FKs for both arms. I'll come to the other arm, make sure that disable IK is checked, set a keyframe on the upper and lower FKs then select both layers, press U, select those keyframes I just created, hold down Option Command or Alt Control, and click to convert them to hold keyframes. Then I can jump back to this set of keyframes by pressing K on the keyboard or back at frame 20 and now I can pose the arms. In this first step, I put his back leg forward which means that the front arm needs to go forward with it. Your arms swing in the opposite direction of your legs. When the front leg goes backwards, the front arm goes forwards, and reverse for the back leg and back arm. Front leg goes back, that means the front arm goes forward. That's this arm here, I'll start by rotating the upper FK and just like the position of the legs, I'm going to round off these numbers just to make it a little bit cleaner. Why don't I start with something around and maybe negative 35 for the rotation of that shoulder, then bend this in maybe 25 for the elbow and then the hand which is this rotation right here maybe do that 25 as well. Now we'll do the back arm. Start by rotating the upper FK. Maybe I'll just do the opposite numbers since I can't exactly see the hand there, I'm just going to do the same numbers in a positive direction. I'll do 35, 25 and 20. The arm goes completely behind the body, but I'm going to try and do this symmetrically and see what happens. Now my arms and legs are posed, but I don't want him standing perfectly straight up and down. I want to give his head sum rotation. Now because of the weigh that this character is made, his head, neck, torso and hips are all contained in the same shape, if I'm rotating him to change his head position, it's also going to throw off his hips position and because of that, it's going to change the tension between the legs. I need to bee careful not to rotate him too far and make whatever adjustments I need to get this pose to work. When he throws his leg out forward like this, I want him to be rotated just a little bit back, write about there is good and that's rate at negative 10, I like that a lot. But now this leg is stretched out, so I need to move him forward until that leg bends. It looks like just moving him forward isn't going to do it because now, the back leg is stretched out, so I'll drop him down just a little bit more and that actually works. You see, as I dropped him down both legs bent and that's what I'm looking for, to have both legs snap out of that stretch position at the same time. That rotation, and that position works well for that pose. Next thing I want to do is rotate this foot up so that he lands on his heal rather than flat on his foot when he takes that step. I'm going to back this rotation up to maybe rate around negative 35, that looks like a pretty good angle. Now, I think this arm rotation is a little bit lo, so I'm going to come back to this arm and just increase the values of all of these, maybe bring that upper FK to negative 50, the lower FK to negative 45, and then the rotation of the hand, I'll bring that up to negative 50. Now, I'm seeing a problem right hear. It's pretty hard to tell because the arm is the same color as the body, but the arm is showing up behind the mouth, so I need to take a look at all of my artwork layers. I'll click the shy switch to unshy all of my artwork and yeah, it looks like my left arm is below the mouth, pupils and hair, and really those should both be at the very top, so that they show up on top of everything else. I just move them up and then I'll relock them, and then I'll make sure everything else is ordered correctly, and it looks like my right arm and hand are also above layers that they shouldn't be. They should show up at the very back, I need to move them below everything else. Unlock those two layers, drop them below everything else, and then lock them again, and now, my layer stack looks good. I'll reshy all of my layers, press "U" to bring up all my keyframes again, and now that I have a better looking pose for that arm, I'm going to again mirror these values on the back arm., I'll change this to 50, this to 45 and this to 50. Again, you can't see that, but having a symmetrical swing is what I'm going to start with. Okay, I think this is a good first contact pose for this character. Next, I want to make the opposite contact pose where this leg is out front and this one is back. I'm going to jump 20 frames forward by holding the Shift key and pressing "Page Down" twice, I need to flatten out this foot, so I'll change the rotation back down to zero, and this foot needs to be rotated the same amount, so I'll change that rotation to negative 35, and then I want to move this foot forward as much as this foot was. Now, depending on your character's proportions, one leg may not move the same amount forward that the other leg moved backwards. It just so happens that this character's symmetry worked out, that the right foot moved forward 300 pixels and the left foot moved backwards 300 pixels, but don't worry if your character didn't do that. Just remember that you need to move them forward and backward equal amounts, for example, if this foot moved 400 pixels for it instead of 300, then this foot would then need to move 400 pixels forward on this pose. Keeping those distances equal is critical when we actually go to make him walk across the screen. I'm just going to reverse these values, I'll change this to negative 300 and this to 300, then I'll drop the rotation of this foot down to zero, and this one up to negative 35, and now, those two legs are positioned the way that they should be. Next, let's get the tension set between these two legs, I'm going to grab the COG, bring it backwards till right about there, it looks like it's snapping, then I'll use the Arrow keys to move it down one pixel, and right there the tension snaps on both legs, but it looks like he's a little bit further back than I'd like, so I'm going to seen if I can nudge them forward just a little bit just so the weight is coming down in that leg a little bit more balanced. That's another thing to keep in mind when you're animating your character. Nothing that I'm saying is set in stone, I'm basically just using a framework to base my characters poses off of, but eventually I'm going to be finessing all of these key frames to make the work look the best that I can. For now, I think that's a good position for his body over top of his legs, and I'm fine with the rotation being negative 10 on this stride as well, so I'm going to set another keyframe for that rotation by clicking on the "Add Keyframe" button for that property. Next, I need to do the arms, and I just want to swap the rotation values of both arms, I could do that buy typing in negatives in front of each of these values, or because those values are already setup in these three keyframes, I'm just going to select them, Copy, click on this layer, and Paste. Then I'll do the same thing for this layer, Copy, Paste. Now, that I can actually see this arm's bend, I think it's a little bit too extreme. For one, his hand is bent way too far, so I'm going to bend that back maybe something around here. You might be thinking, why in the world is his arm bending backwards? Well, because this character is so cartoony and his limbs are so noodlelly, I'm okay with them bending backwards. But I do think that this is a little to extreme. If you had a more human character, you might want to prevent his elbow from bending and set his arm in a more extended position, but like I said, I'm going to bend this back just a little bit, maybe I'll do this at 15, the hand to be maybe around 25, and I'll rotate the shoulder to 50. Now, I want to compare these two poses, to do that, I'll use the J key to jump back, now, the J and K keys move back and forward between keyframes, but it also snaps to your work area. That's why my play head stopped right here. I'm going to move my work area forward to line the endpoint up with the first keyframe. Now, when I press the J and K keys, I can jump between poses. I'm going to be doing this a lot in the entire process of animating my characters. Like you said, this is a very relaxed walk, he's just swinging his arms freely back and forth. I think on this pose, his arm could be bent even a little bit more. I'm going to grab this lower FK to bend the arm at the elbow, maybe to something around 75, I think that's a better looking pose. Now, I'm going to copy these three keyframes and again paste them on the opposite arms first key pose, and then I'll copy this hands second key pose and paste it on this hand's first key pose, that way the swing between these two arms is symmetrical.
5. The Passing Pose: Okay. So we've got both of our contact poses. Next, let's do our passing pose, which is directly in between those two. I'll hold "Shift" and press "Page Up" to go right in between those two poses. The passing pose is when one leg is up off of the ground in the middle of its swing forward. So there are two passing poses, just like there are two contact poses. Since our first contact pose is the front leg back, that means our first passing pose is the front leg off of the ground, and the back leg planted. To build this passing pose, I'm actually going to start with my neutral pose. So I'm going to copy and paste all of the key-frames one layer at a time from my neutral key-frames that I set up at the beginning. It's important that you copy one at a time, because if I copy all of them and try and paste, After Effects duplicates all of those layers. It's a little tedious, but copy and paste one at a time. The eyes, I'm actually going to leave for now. I'm just actually going to hide it and lock it, so I don't mess with it. I'll continue copying and pasting these key-frames until I'm back to my neutral pose. Because this foot traveled the same distance forward as it did backwards, the neutral pose is directly in between those two positions, so it works perfectly to build this passing pose. Again, to start, I need to drop him down just a little bit so that his knees are bent. Then again, if I jump back to my first frame, the front leg is back, so that is the leg that needs to be picked up. So I'm on passing pose, I will click and drag while holding "Shift" to bring that leg up. I also want to rotate the foot backwards so that the toes drag quite a bit. So I want to make sure that I drag that foot up far enough so it doesn't go below the floor. If I jump back to that first frame again, you can see that the floor is halfway through that foot, but just to make it easier, I'm going to use that as my ground plane that the toe shouldn't pass. Let me zoom back out here. Now, if I wanted this character to be very expressive and maybe doing somewhat of a march, I would bring that foot way up, so we would have a high step. But for this walk, I am again, just going for a very casual stroll. So I'm just going to bring his leg up just as far as it has to so that his toes don't touch the ground. I want to rotate him forward now and why don't I just try 10 degrees forward so that it mirrors the poses on either side of it from negative 10 to 10. Jumping back and forth between these two poses, actually looks pretty good. He might be dropped down just a little bit too far. Let me pull him up just a bit so that his front leg, which he's holding his weight with, isn't quite so bent; maybe down just one or two clicks. Yeah, I think that's good. So if I jump back and forth between these three poses, we can already start to see this animation happening. Next, I want to bend his arms just a little bit so they're not all at the neutral values. His shoulder is actually fine, but I'm going to bend his elbow just a little bit, maybe negative 10 and bring his hand in a little bit, maybe also negative 10. Then I'll do the same thing for the other arm, negative 10, negative 10. That way he doesn't look so stiff. Now we can jump forward to the next pose and then go 10 more frames forward. Again, I'll hold "Shift" and press "Page Down" and we can do the next passing pose. This time, I'll duplicate the previous passing pose. So one layer at a time, I will copy and paste all of these key-frames, but this time, I need to zero out the position and rotation of the left foot and instead, bring the right foot up and rotate that foot backwards. Let me zoom in here so I can see clearly, needs to be at least that high up so his toes don't touch the ground. Then I need to bring the COG down and maybe back a little bit, so that the weight of his body balances over that leg a little bit better. Let's see, maybe right about there. I like that bend in his leg. Looks like he's leaning forward getting ready to catch himself on this leg that's swinging forward. So now I need to go 10 more frames forward and duplicate the first pose so that I have a loop. I will copy and paste all of these key-frames and I have my original contact pose again. Now, let's take a look at these key-frames. Just like the eyes, I'm not going to worry about the hairs animation right now, that'll be something that I come to near the end of the process because it's a secondary animation that doesn't affect the overall walk cycle. Now, we copied and pasted this key-frame for the hair because it was set as a neutral position value. But I actually don't need them up here, so I'm going to delete them. But this left foot, I missed setting a key-frame for the rotation value on the first key pose because it was a rotation of zero, I didn't need to change it. So it's the same as my neutral position. But it's very important that any of these properties that are animating have a key-frame set on each one of these key poses. If they're not set, it can mess up the process later on. So at this stage, I need to make sure that all of these key poses are locked in. So I'll set a key-frame for the rotation of the left foot by clicking on the key-frame button and then go to the last pose and copy and paste that key-frame over. Now, I want to preview this loop, but because this key pose is identical to the first one, I want to make sure that my work area's set one frame prior to this so that it doesn't duplicate the frame when it loops. I'll press "Page Up" on the keyboard to go back one frame and then press "N" on the keyboard to set the work area's out point, then, I will run preview by pressing "Zero" on the number pad. Just based on the contact and passing poses, we can already see the beginnings of this walk cycle happening. This is also a great time to work on the timing of your key-frames. I've just been spacing them out in 10 frame increments, but I think that's a little bit too slow for this walk cycle. So what I want to do is change the 10-frame increment to eight-frame increments. So I'll do that by stopping the preview, selecting all but the first key pose, holding down option or "Alt" on a PC and pressing the left arrow twice to nudge those key-frames forward, then I'll de-select the front pose, move it two more frames, and continue this process until all of my key poses are eight frames apart. Then I'll come to this key pose, backup one frame, set my work area, and run preview again. I think that's a much better speed. So at this point, you should definitely play around with the timing until you've got something that you're very happy with. Because we're going to be adding a whole lot more key-frames and this stage is where we're setting the structure for the rest of the animation.
6. Testing The Walk Speed: His walk speed looks pretty good to me right now, but I'm going to take it even one step further to make sure that he is walking at a speed that I'm happy with. I'll stop this animation, come over to my project panel, and drag this comp into a new one, and I'm going to switch back to my main panel layout, by clicking on that button, just to give myself some more room. I'll resize this comp by pressing Command or Control key and changing the widths to 1920, and the height to 1080, so that it's 1080 p. Then I'll scale them down, so that it fits within my comp a little bit better. Then I want to go back into that work , collapse my key-frames, unshare my artwork, and find that background group, and disable it. I'll share that artwork again. Now I have a transparent background for my character. Now I started my walk at frame 20 so if I jump forward 20 frames, there's my first key pose. I'm going to trim my layers in point to this this frame by holding Option or Alt on a PC and pressing the left bracket, and then if I come back to this comp and to see my key-frames, I need to go to frame 52 to reach that identical key pose. I moved my play head to 52 and this comp, if I go back to this comp, it also has moved to frame 52. Then what I want to do is enable time remapping, by right-clicking, going down to time, and clicking on enabled time remapping. Then I will add a new keyframes at this frame, 52, jump to the end point by pressing I on the keyboard and set a keyframe layer, for the frame of 20. Then I'll delete the first keyframes, jump forward two frames, to delete the last keyframes. Now because of my time remapping, the animation stops at frame 52 and doesn't go any further. I'm going to back this layer up to the beginning of the comp by going into the beginning and pressing the left bracket to snap that layer to that point in time, and then I'm going to write a very simple expression that will loop this playback between these two keyframes. I'll hold down Option, or Alt on a PC and click on the stopwatch, and then type loopOut, and then open and close parentheses. I'll click off of this editor to close my expression, and now this will play from frame 20 to frame 52, and then loop. You see that it jump from frame 52 to 21, which is directly after these identical key pose. If I set my walk area way out here, and run preview, you see that this is now a looping animation. Now that I have this looping comp, I'm going to animate him moving across the screen to see how fast he's actually moving based on the distance that I set between the key poses. I'm going to start him off screen, hold Option and press P to add position keyframes. Then move forward a few seconds, maybe wait around four seconds and move him to the opposite side. Then I'll run preview to see if the motion matches up with his feet, and it looks like he's moving away too fast for how slowly his legs are moving. It's a little hard to tell at this point, but let me drag this keyframes away out and see if that helps. Now it's still pretty hard to tell whether or not he's moving at a correct pace, because in this comp, there is only one pose change every eight frames. In this comp, the position value is moving on every single frame. To match the positions frame rate to the key poses frame rate, I'm going to add a new adjustment layer, by going to layer, a new adjustment layer, and add an effect called Posterize Time. What Posterize Time does, is changes the frame rate of whatever you apply it to, by default it's set to 24, which is what my comp is set to. But because these key poses are spread out in eight frame increments, all I have to do some simple math to find out what frame rate that would resemble. If I take the actual frame rate of 24 frames per second, and divide it by the increment of frames that I have for my key poses, which is eight, 24 divided by eight, is three. I'm only seeing three frames per second of this walk cycle. If I change my Posterize Time frame rate to three frames per second, and then preview, now the position value change matches the key framing values of my key poses. Now what I'm looking for is that his feet stay planted as he walks by, and that actually looks pretty good. He might be moving just a little bit too quickly across the screen, so I could drag this out just a few frames, until it looks like his feet are planted perfectly, and it looks like they're walking now. If I extend this timeline out, you can get a better sense for how quickly he's actually moving. That actually took him almost eight full seconds to get across the screen. He's really not moving that quickly, but I might not have realized how slowly he was moving had I not set up this second comp. I really encourage you to go through this process before you move on animating, so that you can know that your timing is exactly where you want it. Since this character is just strolling along, I'm fine with that timing but if I wanted to speed them up, maybe I take another two frames out between each one of these key poses, and then that would be 24 divided by six, so it would be four frames per second. Then I can see how quickly that makes him walk. Like I said, I'm happy with this pace. I'm going to switch back to my character animation layout, go back to my walk cycle comp. We can close out the other one, and I'll just rename it Trevor-Walk_Speed Test, and I'll zoom back into my keyframes.
7. The Up & Down Poses: Now that I have my contact and passing poses, I'm going to come back in between each one of these poses, and add my up and down poses. After the first contact pose, my character is going to drop down. So the next pose is called the down pose. In the previous pose, his heel, just touched the ground. Now the entire weight of his body is coming downwards, and that leg is going to absorb all of his weight, while this leg gets picked up. But I don't have to start from scratch. I'm actually going to let After Effects generates some keyframes for me, and I'll then modify. So I'm going to select all of these keyframes, and temporarily convert them to linear keyframes. Hold Down command or Control on a PC, and click on one of them, so that they all turned the linear frames. Then I want to make sure that I'm directly in between these two poses, which has four frames. I'll jump to the first one, and say, 1, 2, 3, 4, taps to the Page Down key on the keyboard, and with all of these keyframes still selected, I'm going to click on the "Add keyframe" button for one of them, and that generates keyframes for all of those values. Then we do the same thing for all of my other poses, go 1, 2, 3, 4 frames forward, and add another pose. Jump forward with a K key on the keyboard. Jump forward four frames. Again, 1, 2, 3, 4. Now I've got all these keyframes generated, and I'm immediately going to select them again, hold down Option, Command or Alt control on a PC, and click to convert them back to hold keyframes. Now, I have all these in-between poses generated for me automatically that I can then go in, and modify the properties that need to be modified because these poses are directly between our key poses, a lot of the values that After Effects generated are already correct. But some of them I need to modify to make my walk cycle behave properly. Just for fun though, let's ran preview this to see how it looks. You can see that just by doubling the number of poses, we've already got something that much more resembles a walk cycle, but there's some things that we need to deal with. The first thing is coming back to this pose. Remember, our first contact poses, his back legs stretched out forward. The next pose would be the down position where his body's weight is coming down onto this lake. I need to grab this COG, and drop him away down, and push him forward. So that the weight of his body transfers onto that leg. Let me jump back by pressing "J" on the keyboard to compare these two poses. Right now, pretty much just looks like he's only moving forward because the rotation is changing. So I'm going to drop him down even more, pull him a little bit forward. I think, I can pull him down even a bit more, and maybe a little bit more forward. Now we've got a nice shift in weight. He's really dropping from this contact position to the down position. Putting all his body's weight onto that leg. Now at this point, his foot should be 100 percent flat on the ground. If we take a look here at the rotation, it's not set to zero. So zero that rotation out, so his foot's flat on the ground, and we take a look at his back leg, his foot is pushing through the ground, which is not okay. I need to drag that foot upwards, so his toes aren't touching the ground. Now if I compare those two poses, that looks pretty good. Now, move forward to the next passing pose. Jump forward one more, and this will be our first up pose. The up pose is going to be the point where your character is highest off the ground. So if I jump back one key pose to this passing position, he needs to be higher than this point. Right now, it looks like he might drop down just a little bit. I definitely need to start by grabbing this COG, and dragging him up, and maybe moving him back, so that I can stretch his leg out more without actually stretching it. Maybe right about there, and then compare the two poses. It still does not look like he's moving that far up. What I'm going to do is shift him forward a little bit more, so that he's balanced over that leg, and then jump back one pose. I'm actually going to bring him down a bit on this one, so that there's that more drastic difference between the two poses heights. There we go, now we're getting a nice shifts between this passing position, and his up position. If I come back a few more poses, I'll just start at the beginning. We've got contact down, passing where he comes up a little bit, up, where he's fully stretched out at its highest point, down to this passing pose. You can start to see this flow for this COG here. What else needs to happen on this up pose? Well, for one, the toes on his left foot are shooting through the ground, which again is something we do not want. So I'll drag his leg up on this pose as well. Now, if we step through these poses, we can see that animation of his foot just being picked up, and his toes just hovering above the ground before coming down again. That's looking pretty good. Why don't we ran preview to see how those legs are moving. I think that's good for the first up pose. Let's move forward then we need to come back down again. We need to drop this COG way down. We get his drop maybe push him forward, just balance him over his right leg. While I'm noticing that, I'm going to zero-out the rotation of that foot. Maybe back him up just a little bit then compare those two poses, and it looks like he's dropping a pretty good amount. Then again, with this back foot, it looks like I made a mistake. On this pose, I moved his leg directly up, but it was also position back. This was one of my passing poses, which should have been based off of the neutral pose. So the X position should be zero, not 300. I'm going to jump back to my other passing post to make sure I didn't mess that one up. I've got my contact down passing that's got a position of zero and zero. So I'm okay on that pose, I'm going to check my other foot. On that one, it's X position is zero, so that one's correct. Now I need to be very careful in the way that I fix this because I let After Effects generate some of these keyframes. I'm going to come to this pose, and I'm going to change the X position to zero. Then I'm going to delete the keyframe before and after it just for the position, and I'll convert these three keyframes to linear by selecting them in Command or Control, clicking on them. Then I'll jump back to this pose here, set a position keyframe. Jump forward to this pose here, set a position keyframe, and then reconvert them all to hold keyframes. By holding Option, Command or Alt control on a PC and clicking, and there, crisis averted. Let that be a lesson to you that you're going to make mistakes. I've animated the walk cycle over this character probably five times now, and I still messed up. It's not important to be perfect every time. It's important that when you catch your mistakes, you fix them right away. Because with so many keyframes, and so many properties, little mistakes like that, can mess up an entire walk cycle. The quicker that you fix them, the less of a headache they'll cause later on. Now that that's fixed, let me just step through all the key poses for that foot, and make sure that everything's working. So we've got contact, down, passing, up, contact passing, and this is where the toes are going to the floor. So we're back to where I was. I need to raise this controller up, so as toes don't touch the ground, and we step forward, passing. This is our up pose, the toes are again going to the floor. So I'm going to rotate them up then I will zoom back out so I can see my whole character. I'll move back to the COG to complete this up pose. I will drag it up, maybe position it back just a little bit, so that it's balanced over the back leg. Looking to just release the tensions of that leg doesn't snap into a stretched position, and I think that works. We compare the two up poses. This is the first one, I'll just make a snapshot of that frame, and jump forward to the second up pose, and show my snapshot. I think that looks pretty good. They're pretty symmetrical. Let's ran preview to see how that looks. Yeah, I think that's looking great, he's got a very nice float with his walk. You see those arms swinging out and forward symmetrically? He's at his nice up and down motion. Or each leg is compressing and stretching back out to push him up, I think we're in good shape. At this point, I'm going to address the issue of his eyes. It doesn't really appear like he's looking where he's walking. So I'm going to unlock that layer, and then just offset the X position, so that it looks like he's looking in the direction that he's walking that's all I have to do. Now I can lock it, collapse it, and don't even think about it. Next, I want to animate his hair. Now this I want to be flapping in time with the up and down positions. So when he's down for the first time, I want that hair to be flowing back, like the wind is blowing it back. So I'm going to take the hair rotation, and drop it backwards, maybe negative 25. Then I'll go forward to the up position, and drop it down. Maybe 15. Then I'll go back down, and copy the down rotation value. Then jump forward again to the up position, and copy, and paste that as well. Just for the sake of filling in these other frames, I'm just going to set zero values for all the other poses. It's going to be slightly different when I actually go to tween this animation. But just to get a preview, this is a good start. There you can see that the hair just bounces up and down with the body.
8. Finessing The Keyframes: Now that I have my key poses working and they're all nice and lined up like this. I'm going to duplicate my comp again. First, I'll rename this Trevor-Walk-KeyPoses. Then I'll duplicate that comp and rename it, Trevor-Walk-Tween. Now tween is just a made-up term for in-between frames. When after effects interpolates the position between two non hold keyframes, that's called in-betweening or tweening for short. So if I open up that comp, I can now select all of those keyframes and convert them to linear, and then what I want to do is while holding down "Command" or "Control" on a PC, click one more time to convert them to continuous velocity keyframes. After Effects also calls these Auto Bezier. But basically you just moves out the velocity between each keyframe so that it all flows a little bit nicer and that works really well for walk cycles since they're very rhythmic. So now that after effects is generating keyframes between my key poses, I'm going to go ahead and run preview and see what it looks like. I'd say we've got a pretty decent looking walk cycle. But we're going to take this even further to really polish off this walk cycle so that it looks the best that it can be. First thing I want to do is delete keyframes that don't need to be there. Our Key poses, they're very important because it keeps everything nice and structured and allows us to generate those in-between key poses somewhat automatically. But now that we're going to finesse these keyframes, I can get rid of things that don't need to be there anymore. First off, every other keyframe on the arms rotation are right in the middle of the two key poses on either side, so I really don't need these keyframes there. I'm going to select every other set of keyframes and delete them from the arms. You see they moved just a tiny bit, but really the important poses for the arms are these extremes, where the arm is bent all the way, halfway, in between, where they're stretched out, and then when they're bent out the opposite direction. Now every keyframe on the cogs position is very deliberate. We set that by hand and they're very important to the up and down motion of this walk cycle, so I don't want to touch any of those. But every other rotation keyframe is unnecessary because they're directly between the two extremes that we set, just like the arms. So I'll select every other keyframe for that and hit "Delete". The same is true for the hair, except one pose offset. Because I set the keyframe values based on the up and down poses rather than the contact and passing poses. So this keyframe in-between the down and the up is unnecessary. I'll delete that and then every other frame after that, I'll also delete. For now, I'm going to leave the first and last. We'll come back to that later. If I run "Preview" at this point, everything's still looking nice. Now let's take a look at the feet and see what we can get rid of down here. Well, first of all, the rotation of the left foot starts at an angle, but then snaps down to zero, stays at zero, stays at zero, stays at zero, and then rotates up. So since these four keyframes are identical, I can get rid of the two in between. Now as I did that you can see that the value has changed even though this keyframe is set to zero, and this keyframe is set to zero and that's because of the continuous velocity. To fix that, I'm just going to convert this to a hold out by holding "Option Command" or "Alt Control" on a PC and clicking, and that will prevent the value from changing until it gets to the next keyframe. Coming into it, it changes, but it doesn't change on the way out. I can do the same thing for the other foot, that should be happening right around here. There's the rotation of the foot is angled. Jump forward one keyframe, zero, zero, zero, zero. So I can get rid of these two keyframes. "Delete", the value is changing, so I need to again convert that to a hold keyframe. That looks good. Now let's take a look at this motion. I don't really need the rotation value here because this is the maximum rotation of the foot, so I'm going to delete that and then the same goes for this keyframe. I don't need the rotation to be keyframed at this point because the keyframe directly after that is its extreme rotation. So I'll delete that. I'll come up to the other foot and do the exact same thing. I don't need this keyframe and I don't need this keyframe. Now the toes are going through the ground, but we will fix that in just a little bit. Now let's look at the position of this foot. Because it's moving at a constant speed, I don't need any of the keyframe values between this pose and this pose, here and here. So I'm going to delete all three of these keyframes and I'm also going to convert these two keyframes to linear. That way the foot's velocity between these two keyframes is constant. There's an equal amount of distance covered between every frame once the foot hits the ground. I'll come to the other foot and do the same thing between this keyframe, and this keyframe. I want consistent speed and I don't need any extra keyframes in there, so I'll delete them, and then convert them to linear keyframes by "Command" or "Control" clicking on them. Now if we take a look at the motion path, we're basically getting an arc for when this foot is picked up and moved forward. You can see that motion is taking 1,2,3,4,5 keyframes to achieve that curve and between each one of those keyframes, it's a straight line. I can actually achieve this curve and make it even smoother by deleting these two in-between keyframes. Now I know this might seem a little redundant to offset all of these keyframes just to be deleting them, but I promise you, setting up that structure beforehand allows you to catch mistakes early just like the mistake that I caught. Character animation really is a process, but I think it's a necessary process and after you do it a few times, you'll definitely see the benefits. Okay. Now that I've gotten rid of those two keyframes, my foot is just being picked up and going in a straight line to this keyframe and then back down. What I want to do is modify the motion path, so that this turns into a nice curve. So I'll switch to my Pen tool and hover over this motion path and click once and that's switches this to curve. Then I'll switch back to my Selection tool and grab the handles of this motion path to raise the foot up much quicker. Then I'll bring this side out a little bit as well. Now if I step through this animation, you can see that my foot is following a nice curve. So let's run a "Preview" that. If you compare it to the other foot, it's basically completing the same motion. It does look like the toes are dragging a little bit on the ground though, so what I might want to do is grab this keyframe right here and drag the foot up even just a little bit higher, and then modify the motion path so that it's a little more symmetrical. Now if I scrub through here, looks like those toes are clearing the ground. Let me run preview. I'm pretty happy with the way that that looks. To add a little bit more personality to this leg, I'm going to kick the toes out a little bit quicker, but I'm going to do it without adding any keyframes. Instead, I'm going to grab this second rotation value, which is right here when the foot is almost pointed straight down and then go directly in between those two keyframes just for reference. I'm going to switch to my Graph Editor. Now if you're unfamiliar with the Graph Editor, go check on my other class animating with ease, where I go in-depth into how to use this tool. But basically I want to get to this keyframes value faster than it already is. Great. Now I'm looking at the value graph, so if you're looking at the speed graph, go ahead and switch over to the value graph. I'm going to grab the incoming velocity handle for that keyframe and drag it back. I'm going to try and match the angle that it's already at and just drag it up into the left. As I do this, take a look at the foot, you can see that the rotation is happening quicker the further I pull that out. Now if I scrub through this, you can see that the rotation happens in much quicker. It looks like the toe dips just a little bit into the ground there, so I'm going to pull it back just a little bit. Again, with this character design, the ground plane is not 100 percent critical, I have the guide lined up basically with this angle, so as long as the foot doesn't go any lower than it is on this first frame, I'm happy. Let's preview that and see what it looks like. You see that that rotation just happens a little bit quicker now and it just has a nice flow to it. Now I want to come to right before the contact pose, right here. While still in the Graph Editor, I want that foot to get to this angle much quicker, so I'm going to back up to right in between these two keyframes and pull this influence handle out quite a bit, so that the rotation completes much sooner. Let's run "Preview". Now you can see that it really kicks that foot out every time it brings the leg forward. I like that motion a lot. If you compare it to the other foot, you can really see the difference. All right. Now that foot is looking pretty good, let's move on to the other foot. "Zoom" back out on my timeline, grab the right foot and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to get rid of these two keyframes on the position, and then I'll switch to my Pen tool, click "To add a curve". Switch back to Selection tool and bring that foot up much quicker, so that the toes don't go through the ground. Then I'll adjust the velocity of the rotation of that foot. So I'll jump back into the Graph Editor, "Zoom" in a little bit, pull this influence out. Again, making sure that that toe just doesn't go any lower than it is at the first frame. Maybe pull that in just a tiny bit. Looking good. Then I want to come to this keyframe and bring it in quite a bit. Let's run "Preview". Now that actually ended up being more extreme than the left foot, but I like it. So I think I'm going to go back to the left foot rotation, find the point in time where that is being kicked out, so that's this keyframe right here and then make it even more extreme. Let's see what that looks like. Okay. That's a little bit too fast, so let's bring it back in a little bit. This really is a finessing process. You keep making adjustments and previewing until you've got something that you're happy with. I think that's looking great. Let's get a full view. Awesome. I think the motion of the feet are done.
9. Fixing Knee Pops: Now here's another issue I want to deal with. With this left foot is moving back. The knee is popping right there on the up position. Let's take a look at this section of the animation and just step through. It's on this left leg when it's on the ground, I'm just going to step through. It's pushed up and moves back and right there, it snaps to being perfectly straight and then stretches out a little bit before it repeats the loop. I think what's causing that issue, that little wobble, is on this up position, the leg is 100 percent stretched. I'm going to fix that by adjusting the y position. If I use the arrow keys, you can see that in just one click, it jumps from eight pixels to 14 pixels. That's because I'm zoomed really far out. I'm only viewing this at 16.7 percent. The further zoomed in or zoomed out you are changes how big of an increment the arrow keys adjust. I'm going to zoom in even further to 100 percent. You can see that even just one press bends the leg just slightly, and then one more pixel, and it bends quite a bit so that value of 10 is what I was looking for. The highest point is stretched out, but still has this very slight bend to it. Now if I back this up and step through, it gets stretched out to that point and then bends a little bit on its way back down to that contact position. Let's run preview that and see how it looks and we've still got a little bit of a wobble, I think we fixed part of it. But right about here, we've still got a wobble where the up position it's stretched out and then it bends, bends and then straightens out and straightens out again. I'm going to move forward a couple frames to where the leg is bent, where I really wanted to be more straight. Then I'll select the position keyframe of the up pose and go into my graph editor, since I'm editing the position, I can't use the value graph, I need to switch back to the speed graph, and I'll grab the outgoing velocity handle for that keyframe and drag it out. It looks like even dragging that to 100 percent velocity, it still isn't straighten that leg enough. I'm also going to drag this all the way down to 0 and increase the velocity pretty far, probably around 88 percent. Let's step through this animation now and see what it did. We've got our straightened up key pose and it still stays pretty straight, I think that's going to look good. Let's run preview that and you can definitely see a much smoother transition in that bend the knee. That looks great. I'm really happy with the way that that looks. Now we need to deal with the same issue on the right leg so let me get out of my graph editor and step through the animation, one frame at a time. We've got the leg bending, being pushed up to the up position and we've got a slight bend in the knee, which is exactly what I want. It's not perfectly straight, but it pushes the character up as high as it can go. Then it looks like it straightens out further on this frame and snaps to being a 100 percent stretched at that frame. It's still stretched at that frame and then it starts to bend and then boom, the knee really bends there. Why our motion looks so weird when we play this back. Because it really snaps right there, snap. Let's try and fix that. We need to deal with this pose right here because the leg is stretched out when it shouldn't be. I need to drop this down just a little bit. Just two clicks let me back this up and see if that made a difference. I think that might have solved that problem. Let's play it back. I think it's a little less extreme now, but we still have a snap right there, where the leg straightens out really abruptly. Let's take a look at what's going on between this frame and this frame, it's really snapping between being curved and being straight. Let's grab this keyframe of the up pose and back it up in between these two keyframes. Then switch to the graph editor and increase the incoming influence for that position value. I'm going to drag it way down as well. All the way down to 0 and see if that made a difference. Definitely, that's a much smoother transition between this bent knee and the straightened knee. Let's do a full screen preview of that. Beautiful. I'm really happy with the overall motion of this character, but there's one little thing about his feet that I just noticed. Let me back up to the first frame. His foot is rotating on this contact position but it takes four frames for it to get flattened on the ground. Really it should hit the ground much faster because all of his weight is coming down on that hill when really it should be transferred onto the entire foot. At this point, two frames in from that first key pose, I'm going to grab the rotation key frame and bring it back. Now the foot slaps down much quicker and I'll do the same thing for the other foot. Go two frames in and drag that keyframe back. Now if I ran preview, his foot really plops down there on the ground, on every step.
10. Adding Overlap: Now we have our basic walk cycle set and we can finish off the animation by adding some overlap to the motion of his arms and his hair. So we'll start with his left hand. If you're unfamiliar with overlap, is an animation technique that can make certain motions seem less rigid. Right now his shoulder, elbow, and hand are all rotating, at the exact same time throughout the animation. But if we offset each one of these parts by a little bit in time, it can really loosen everything up. But since all of my key frames are contained within this work area, I need to manually loop part of the animation so that it can shift these around in time. So the pose that would happen directly before this one, is the same that would happen just before this one because these two are identical. So I need to duplicate this set of key frames here, back eight frames, so that the same motion happens outside of my work area. I'm going to back up eight frames, and then copy this pose for each arm. Then I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. So this pose and this pose are the same, and eight frames forward would be the same as eight frames forward from this pose. So I'll go eight frames forward, and then copy this pose. Now that my motion is continued, I got eight frames on either side of my animation that I can work with when offsetting the different properties. I want to leave the shoulders rotation where it is, but offset the elbow and the hand forward in time. I'm going to select that set of key frames for both arms, and then hold Option or Alt on a PC and press the right arrow key twice to shift that set of key frames, two frames forward. Then I'll select just the hand and offset that two frames forward as well. Let's run Preview to see what's happening. It's pretty subtle but it definitely adds a little bit of life to the arms swaying back and forth. It just helps make the arms look a little less rigid and almost more life-like. Now if you did the rigging class at the end, I animated Trevor waving. I did this overlap process on the position in rotation of his body. In that instance, it worked just fine because he was standing still. But in his walk cycle, the position values are so important to be exactly where they are, and they're set up to work with the rotation values as well. So I don't want to mess around with overlapping those motions at all, but I can't overlap the hair motion a little bit. Because of the way that I animated the hair, where the key frames correspond to the up and down poses, rather than the contact and passing poses, it's a naturally overlapping animation. Instead of being tightly synchronized on every eighth frame, it goes in-between each one of those eight frames. But because I set these first and last key frames manually and just estimated them at zero, the hair's not actually where I want it to be at those two poses. So what I'll do is delete those first and last key frames, jump back eight frames from here. Because this animation just jumps back and forth between values of negative 25 and 15, I can just copy the key frame on the other side of the first pose. l will just copy and paste that here. Then I'll jump eight frames forward from the last frame, and copy and paste the key frame on the other side of this key frame. Now if I go to the first pose of my loop, you can see that this isn't actually set to zero. It's actually negative 8.2. So it was a little bit off when I was estimating and locking out my key poses. Now if I rum Preview. See that hair is nice and flowy, naturally overlapping because I did it on the in-between poses. That completes the walk cycle for Trevor.
11. Contact & Passing Poses: Now I'm going to show you how we would animate Stu to walk. Now his rig is a bit more complicated because he has more moving parts. I'm able to tilt his head, bend his body at his belly, as well as at his hips. Adding just those two extra controls, can really open up a lot of possibilities for the character animation. Now I'll go on ahead and set key frames for all of the properties I need to animate at their neutral values, and just like with Trevor, I'm not going to be using the IK cases system for the arms, we'll be using the FK setup instead. I don't even need to see the controllers for the hands. Now even if your character isn't as complicated as this rig, I'd still encourage you to watch me animate him because I'm going to approach the walk in a little bit different way that you could use on any type of character. The process will be the same, but the poses are going to be a little bit different. I'm going to jump 20 frames forward, and start on this frame just like with Trevor. The major difference between the two walks, is that with Trevor, he moved forward and backward quite a bit on each step and then added a lot of movement to his overall animation. For Stu, I don't want to move him forward or backward hardly at all. I want most of the motion of his body to just be moving up and down on the y-axis. But I'm going set my poses in the same order. Let's start with the contact position, with his left leg back and his right leg forward. First I'm just going to grab his COG and drop them straight down by holding "Shift" while clicking and dragging, till maybe right about there. Then I'll backup his left leg, until it snaps into lock position right about there. Then do the same thing for the front leg. It looks like it's a locking right about there. I think that might be a little bit too spread out, so I'm just going to look at my values. It looks like I'm going back negative 432 for the back leg, and forward 528 for the front leg. I'm just going to round this off to 500 and negative 400, and then see if I can get both the legs to lock at the same time just by raising up the COG. It looks like the back leg locks before the front leg. I need to even this up by moving the COG backwards to get the tension between the legs to be as close as possible. Maybe right about there. The back leg is still snapping out so I'll push it forward just a little bit, and right about there. Now let me zoom in again to decrease my units, and get that one quick pass the lock position. I had to move the COG a little bit back to center it over those legs, but it was only eight pixels so I think that work just fine. Next, let's set the arms. Rotate the left arm's shoulder back, quite a bit. Probably around 35, and I'll bend the elbow in, and bend the hand back. Let's say 15 and maybe negative 25. I'm going to really bend this one. I'll say 55 for the shoulder, negative 45 for the elbow, and 15 for the hand looks good. Then I'll take the back arm, rotate it at the shoulder forward, maybe negative 25, bend the elbow, maybe negative 35, and then bend the hand. Think negative 30 looks good for that. I want to bend this arm back to be a little bit more straight. Right now it's too curved, and if I straighten out more it'll be a little bit more symmetrical with the front arm. At the elbow I'm going to drop this down probably to just negative five, maybe negative 15. That way there's just a slight curve to the arm. Then I need to rotate this front foot, because remember this is just as he's making contact with that foot to the ground. Let's say negative 35. That looks good. Now his body naturally has this curved backwards a little bit. I'm fine leaving his belly and his hips at a rotation value of zero, but I'm going to tilt his head back just slightly so maybe negative five degrees, just to give it a little bit more curvature. Then let's go forward 10 frames, and set the next contact position. First I'll zero the rotation of this foot, give this foot negative 35, and then swap the position values. This one needs to be 500 forward, and this one needs to go back 400 pixels. Now those feet are lined right up on top of each other, but that should be okay. Then I need to drop down the COG and reposition again so that tension is equal between the two legs. It looks like I'm too far zoomed out to get this nice and precise so I'm going to zoom in a couple times, go up until both legs are snapped. Right there. Then I need to reduce the tension on this leg and increase it on this one. I need to push it forward to the right. One or two clicks, then down, down, up. Still less tension on this leg so go forward two more clicks down. Ah, there we go. The back leg is snapped so I'll press the left arrow to nudge it back and up down, back one up down. I need to zoom in even further to get this symmetrical. Now I'm zoomed in to 100 percent where each press of the arrow keys is just adjusting by one pixel. Even at that increment, I'm unable to get the tension to be exactly the same between the two legs. Sometimes that's going to happen. I don't want to zoom in any further because I want my pixel values to be whole numbers, so I'm just going to find the spot that's closest to having both legs with the same amount of tension. Right about here looks good. I'll zoom back out, and then I'm going to try swapping the rotation values of the two arms. I'll copy the back arm's key frames and paste them on the front arm, and then do the opposite. Then for now I think that looks fine. The head's rotation can be the same on this contact position so I'm just going to set the "Add New key frame" button to duplicate the previous one. I forgot to set a key frame for the "Belly Rotation" on the first pose so I'm just going to set one now, move it back and then set another one. While I'm doing this I'm just going to make sure that I have key frame set for everything. Now my goal is to not rotate the hips at all. I actually don't need to set any key frames for that value since the neutral position is already at zero. But I do need to come back to my first pose, and make sure rotation value of zero is set for the back foot. Now that everything's nice and filled in, I'll jump back and forth between those two key poses. I think that's a good start. Let me zoom in on my timeline, and I'll step back five frames by pressing the "Page Up" key, and I'll do my first passing pose. Just like before, I'm going to duplicate my entire neutral pose by selecting the key frames one layer at a time and copying and pasting. There we go. Now on this passing pose he's not going to be so far up, so I'm going to drop them down. If I zoom in here and take a look at the motion path of the COG, we can see where the key frames are for the two contact positions. I want to place this somewhere in between the upright position and the contact positions. Right about there is probably a good guess. I'll zoom back out. Now just to double-check my first pose, the left leg is back. That is the one that will be up in the air and crossing on this key pose. I will pick it up off the ground, rotate the foot down and probably back a little bit. I think for this walk I want to make him a pretty high stepper so I'm going to drag this up quite a bit. That's really all I need to do for this pose. The arms would be around this position for the swing. This foot is where it should be on the passing pose. The foot is flat, so I'll jump 10 frames forward by holding "Shift" and pressing "Page Down, " and do the next passing pose. Again copying and pasting the original neutral pose, one layer at a time. Then I will copy and paste the position from the pose we just created, so that he's at the same height in both key poses. This time I'll pick up this foot off the ground, rotate it back, maybe lift it just a bit higher. That should be good for now. I'll go five more frames forward, and then duplicate the first pose so that we create our loop. I've got contact, crossing, contact, crossing, contact. Let's run preview this to see how it looks. Pretty good. Now I like the speed of this walk, but with the way that I'm timing out these poses, I need to have an even number of frames between each key pose. Right now it's five frames. There's no frame directly between each one of the key poses. I think if I took out one frame between each key pose, the walk would be too fast. Instead, I'm going to add one frame between each key pose. I'll select all of the poses after the first frame, hold down "Option" and press the right arrow key. That adds one frame in between each one of these key poses. Set my work area again and run preview. I think that works well. Now before I go to the next step, looks like I accidentally copied and pasted the rotation for the COG when I made the passing poses. I'm going to select those two key frames and hit "Delete, " and then I'm actually going to hold "Shift" and press "R" to collapse the rotation of that layer just so it doesn't get in the way.
12. Up & Down Poses: Next step is to select all of my keyframes, convert them to linear by holding command or control on a PC and clicking on one of them. Then I will go directly in between each one of these key poses, with all of my keyframes selected and click on the Add New Keyframe button. Then I'll immediately convert all of these back to old keyframes by selecting them, holding Option command or Alt Control on a PC and clicking on one of the keyframes. Now let's run review again, to see what we've got. All right, we're well on our way, but now I need to add in the up and down positions for the COG. We go from contact to down. I need to grab the COG and drop him down probably quite a bit so that there is a decent shift between the first contact and first down position. I'll worry about the legs later. Right now I just want to set the position for the COG across all of these key poses. We're traveling down and this is the lowest point in the walk, then we'll go back up a little and then this will be our up position. I'll tap the up arrow key until I get that front leg to snap into position. Looks like right there is the snapping point, so I'm actually going to zoom in a couple of times to be at 100 percent. With the leg snapped right now, I will tap the arrow key down until it unsnaps right there. Since this pose is the highest the character will be, it's okay to have that leg stretched out almost to the point of being overextended. Now if I step back to the passing pose just before that oppose, you can see there's not much of a height change between the two. Since I need this one to be the highest, I'm going to drop this pose down a decent amount. Now there's a definite change in the position between those two poses. If I back up one more pose, we pretty much got an equal change in height between the down pose, the passing pose and the up pose. That's looking great. After the up pose, we've got our second contact, then down again. Since it's on a different foot, it's going to be a different value than the last down pose, so I'm going to do this visually. Comparing it to the previous pose, dropping it down even more, that looks like a decent amount of drop, maybe just a few more taps, there we go. That's a good drop. Then I will come back up and that's definitely going to be too high because on this pose right here, I'm not going to be able to make this much higher before the leg snaps, right there. Again, I'll zoom into 100 percent and tap the arrow key down until that leg unsnaps, looks like right here is the height I need it to be. Compare that to the pose before it, and there's almost no height change again. I will drop this passing pose down. I think that's a good even height position change again between these up and down poses, and then we have our final contact pose again. Let's run preview. Looking good. One thing I am noticing is that his body looks pretty stiff and that's because I forgot to really continue this head rotation and I didn't do anything with the belly rotation. That was my bird but since I caught it now, I'm going to go ahead and work on it. Since I just filled in all of these in-between keyframes, I'm actually going to delete every other keyframe for the head and belly rotation and then repopulate those once my key poses are set. On this first pose, the head is tilted back just slightly and the belly is not rotated. That's actually what I wanted for that pose. That one's fine. I'll jump forward to poses. On this one, I want the head to rotate forward a little bit. I'll go five degrees forward instead of backwards, and then I'll do the same thing for the belly rotation. I'll just rotate it forward five degrees. Then we'll jump to pose is forward, it's back to negative five and zero, then I'll go two more poses forward and copy and paste the keyframe values that I just changed and then two more, and we're back to negative five and zero. Now let's run preview. You see that we have much more personality in his walk now. His head is bobbing back and forth and adding a lot more motion to his walk. Now let me repopulate these key poses. I'll convert all of these back to linear, add new keyframes, and do that for all of the empty spaces. Then I'll convert these back to old keyframes, and we'll run preview again. Much better. I like the way that his head is bobbing. I think it helps bring the whole walk together a little bit better.
13. Simplifying The Keyframes: Now I have all my key poses set. I can select all of my key frames and convert them, to continuous velocity. I'll hold down Command and click once to convert them to linear, and one more time to be continuous velocity. Now let's run preview just to see what it looks like with twinned animation. Pretty good. Now I can get to work removing unnecessary key frames, and I'll start with the arms. The arms are going to lose the most number of key frames, because really I just want them to be swinging back and forth between the two contact poses. These are the extreme values for the arms and everything in between it, is really unnecessary. If I select all the key frames between the first and second contact poses, and everything between the second and third contact poses, I can delete all of those key frames and the arms will still animate between those two extremes, just like I wanted. I'll run preview, just so you can see what that looks like, and It's still a working animation. Now will go back and refine that motion in a little bit. But for now I just want to get rid of any key frames that I don't need. For the head and belly rotation, every other key frame is unnecessary because just like with the arms, those in between key frames, are right in between the two extremes. If I select every other key frame for the head and belly rotation, and delete, the animation still works. Now the same is true for the cog's position, except they're not on the contact and passing poses. Instead, they're on the up and down poses. Because those are the extreme poses for the cog's position. The down pose is the furthest the cog goes down and the up pose is the furthest the cog goes up. I can select every other key frame, offset from the head and belly rotation, and delete those key frames. But now I've broken my loop because there's nothing before this key frame and nothing after this key frame. To complete this loop, I need to backup six frames from this key frame, that's three more frames, 1,2,3, then copy and paste the key frame that would be there. Now this is my down pose and this is my up pose. Before the down pose would be the up pose. I'll copy and paste that key frame, and then I'll go three frames past the last pose, 1,2,3 and I'll do the same thing for this one. This is the up pose, so I'll copy the down pose and paste it right there. Now if I run Preview, my loop is still working. Let's move on to the feet. I'll start with the left foot. This time I want to zoom in here to the motion path just to show you a different way of going about doing this. If we take a look at all the key frames on the motion path, which are all these squares, we can pick out which ones we need and don't need. I definitely need the key frame that goes forward and the key frame that goes backward. I also need that key frame that goes all the way up on my crossing pose. But pretty much everything in between is unnecessary. I'm going to select each one of these key frames of visually by holding the shift key and clicking on them. You see that they are selected down here in the timeline. This is exactly the same as what I did before with all the other values, just clicking every other key frame, that's unnecessary, and then I'll hit "Delete". Now there's one key frame right here, that I did not select. The reason why I didn't select it with my mouse, is because if I do that, see that none of my key frames are being selected. But if I back up, aha, the original neutral pose, happens to be in the exact same position, as the key frame I was trying to click. I don't want to accidentally delete that. Instead, I'll come and find the correct key frame by selecting it in the timeline, until it's highlighted in my Comp Viewer. That's this pose right here, I'll click that key frame, hit "Delete". Now the four main position key frames for that foot is all that are left. Let's do the same thing for the rotation. I don't need the key frames between these two poses, or these two poses. I will select either one of those and hit "Delete". Then I'll step forward. This rotation key frame is directly between these two extremes, so I don't need that. Then we've got a zero rotation between these two key frames. I will delete that, and I think we're in good shape, for the number of key frames that we need. Let's do the same thing for the other foot. I'll start on the first pose. Don't need the position, or rotation key frames on this pose. Don't need this position key frame. Don't need this position key frame. These two rotation key frames are identical. I'll delete the second one. I need that position. I don't need this position. Don't need this rotation, don't need this position or rotation, and there we go. I think we've gotten rid of all the key frames we don't need. Now I can start my finessing process.
14. Finessing The Keyframes: Since we're on the feet, why don't we just start there? With this foot, just like in my other character, I want this foot to go flat within two frames of that initial contact. I'm going to bring the next rotation key frame back all the way to that point. I don't want the value to change between this zero and this zero and as I drag, you can see that this value is changing. Again, I'm going to fix that by converting this to a hold key frame by holding "Option", "Command" or "Alt control" on a PC and clicking. That way, that foot stays flat on the ground for that entire movement. I also want to make sure that these two key frames are linear so that every frame has an equal distance traveled between the contact and lifting positions and it'll be picked up. I want the rotation of that foot to kind of snap back much more quickly. I'll probably come three frames in between each one of these poses and back to the next rotation key frame up to that point. I think that's good for the timing of the key frames but if I stepped through right here, you can see that the foot is going through the ground. We don't want that. Now I could add another key frame and just lift this up but I think I'll be able to fix it if I just adjust the motion path. We'll switch to my pen tool and then click and drag on this point to arch out this movement. The toes are just barely touching the ground but it's so slight that I think I'm going to be able to get away with it. Let's just step through here and yes, it looks like that fixed the problem. We've got a little ways to go before this is completely finished, but you can already tell that this walk is pretty similar to the first one. Everything's moving very evenly. There's nothing really special about his walk. I'd like to make him look a little bit more determined or confident in his walk. I think one way that I could do that is by bringing his legs forward more quickly on each step. I'm going to zoom back in so we can take a look at this motion path and I'm going to grab this key frame where his foot is highest and instead of having it be right in between the front and back positions, click and drag while holding "Shift" and push it forward until this handle kind of lines up with the front position. Now you see we've got a different looking arch for the motion path of that foot. If I ran preview that again, it's subtle but his leg definitely comes forward a lot quicker than it did before. It's these little subtle details that can make a dramatic effect on the way that your character appears when he's walking. Let's do the same thing to his other leg. I'll select that layer. I want to rotate his foot around much quicker so at the third frame, I'll drag the rotation back, step forward to this key pose and go forward two frames and slap that foot down and convert that to a whole key frame. Now my rotation is set. Then I'll switch to my pen tool and adjust the motion path for this foot as well and then I'll switch back to my selection tool, grab that key frame hold shift and drag it forward, again, lining this handle up with the front of the walk. His toes are coming down a little bit further than I'd like. What I want to do is drag this handle out without affecting this handle. To do that, I'm going to switch to my pen tool, click and drag once to break the relationship between the two handles and then click and drag one more time. Doing this a second time allows me to maintain the relationship in angle between the two handles but not in distance. I'll stretch this back out so that the toes don't go so far down below the ground. Now if I ran preview, that looks nice.
15. Easing The Motion: I think the feet are looking pretty good at this point. Let's run preview so we can see the entire character. Those feet are looking nice. Now I want to smooth out the motion between the body moving up and down. Right now, it's just got this continuous velocity key-frames that's making the motion pretty stiff. What I want to do is have him ease in and out of the up positions and bounce pretty hard off of the down positions. If I look at the COG's position and backup to this key-frame, that's one of my down poses. Every other keyframe from that point is a down pose, and all of the other key-frames are up poses. With those selected, I'm going to easy ease them by pressing "F9" on the keyboard. Or you could right-click and go to Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. Now if I run preview, you can see that on all of the up positions, the motion is smooth out just a little bit. I'd like to make this a little bit more extreme. I'm going to right-click on the "Keyframe", and come down to Keyframe Velocity. I'm going to change the incoming velocity's influence from 33, which is the default easy ease value, to 45. I'll do the same thing for the outgoing velocity. I am just increasing the ease by about 12 percent. I'll click "Okay" and then run preview again. Now you see that ease is much more apparent, and I think that bouncing motion is much better for this character's walk. Now, I'm going to take that 45 percent influence value and apply it to other parts of his motion as well. The next thing I'll do is his arms. I want to apply that same easing to these Keyframes. I'll start by converting them to easy ease by pressing "F9". Then I'll right-click, and go to Keyframe Velocity, and set the influence to 45 in and 45 out. Click "Okay", and then run preview. Now his arms are easing on those swings much more dramatically. Let's do the same thing for his head and belly rotation. I'll select all those keyframes, F9 to easy ease, Keyframe Velocity, 45 percent and 45 percent. Hit "Okay", run preview, there we go. Even just that little bit of easing has really added a lot of attitude to his walk. I really like the way that this is looking. His legs' movements are actually pretty good. I think this leg might snap a little bit when it comes forward, so why don't we take a look at that position keyframe. Right there. This keyframe here, if I stepped through, you can see that there's quite a difference in the bending of the knee between these two frames. I'm going to grab this position keyframe and go into my Graph Editor, and on my speed graph, I'm going to drop the speed weigh down around the speed of the previous key-frame of 1800 pixels per second and drag it out just a little bit. Now the change between those two frames isn't quite as drastic. Let's see how that looks in motion. I think that's much better. I might even be able to drag that influence out a little bit more to bring that knee back in just a little bit more. Actually, it doesn't look like it's doing all that much to that frame. I don't want to overdo the easing. I'll just leave it right around there. Run preview. That looks pretty good. Let me step through frame by frame and pay attention to the other leg. At this point, now the change in the knee bend between the first frame and the second frame is pretty drastic, but so is the change between the second frame and the third frame. I think that's why this motion looks pretty good as it is, but I might be able to make that look just a little bit nicer if I grab this keyframe and do the same thing in the Graph Editor. Just drop the speed down a little bit, increase the influence, and now step through one frame at a time. Now I think it's a little more even out. I'll run preview. I think that works pretty well. Now I want to go to the foot's rotation and I want to ease out of this rotation value, where his foot is angled backwards, and ease into this rotation value where his foot is angled on the contact position. I'll start with easing out of this position. I'll select that keyframe, go into the Graph Editor, and then drop the speed to zero for that keyframe, and increase the velocity out quite a bit. Then I'll grab the next keyframe, which is when the foot is rotated upwards on that contact pose, drop that down to the zero speed as well, and crank the influence back in the opposite direction. Now it takes much more time for the value to change between these two key-frames. I'll run preview. It's a little difficult to see on this foot, but it's definitely working. If I turn off the controllers, it might be a little bit easier to see. You can see that that foot is now swinging at a much less constant rate. Now I'll do the same thing for the other foot. Come into the rotation of that keyframe, and this key-frame is the first value that I want to change. I'll drop the speed of that keyframe down to zero and increase the influence. Then the next keyframe is where the foot is angled up, drop that down to zero, and increase the influence for that keyframe as well. Run preview, turn off those two layers so I can see the feet better. Very nice. Let me back out so I can see my entire character. We're in great shape.
16. Adding Overlap: I think all the easing is finished for the character. Now I want to just add a little bit of overlap into the motion, to finish off this work. I'll start with the arms. I need to extend this loop outside of my work area so I can offset these key frames and time to overlap their motion. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 frames between each pose for the arms. I need to go 12 frames forward from this point, I'm going to hold "Shift" and press "Page Down" once to go 10 frames, and then press "Page Down" twice for two more frames. Then I will copy and paste the pose that would happen directly after this pose, which is right here, copy and paste, that loop extends outside my work area in that direction, and then I'll do the same thing in the opposite direction. I'll hold Shift and press "Page Up" to jump back 10 frames, and then press "Page Up" two more times to get 12 frames back. Then I'll copy and paste this pose. Now the arms are swinging outside of my loop. Now we can offset these key frames. I want to select the Lower FK, which is the elbows rotation, and the rotation of the hand, and shift them forward one frame by holding Option and pressing the Right Arrow. That's delaying the rotation from the shoulder by one frame forward. Then I select just the rotation of the hand Option, Right Arrow key so that it's offset one frame from the elbow, and two frames from the shoulder. Then I'll do the same thing for the other arm. Lower FK and rotation of the hand, Option or Alt on a PC, Right Arrow forward than just the rotation of the hand, one more frame. Let's preview that. It's subtle, in fact, it's so subtle that I think I could add an extra frame in between each one of those properties. With this property selected, I'll shift it one more frame forward, and then I'll select the Lower FK and shifted that one frame forward, and I'll do the same thing for the other arm. Now that overlap is much more apparent in the arms swinging. You can especially see it on the hands dangling in their extreme positions. Now the amount of offset that you use is completely your choice. I could increase this another frame if I thought that it was still too subtle. But at that point, it might be getting a little bit too wacky. The point is, you don't know until you try. Honestly, now that I'm looking at it, I like it, what I don't like is now it looks like the arms are out of sync with the legs, and that's because I push the lower rotation three frames forward from everything else. What I'll do is select all of my key frames for both arms, and back it up with one or maybe two frames. Yeah, I think backing that up two frames really helped re-sync the arms movement with the legs movement. So really, it's the elbows rotation and the Lower FK, that's the most in sync with the rest of the body's motion, and for this work, I think that works just fine. Now let's offset the head and belly rotation. I need to do the same thing for these key frames, extending my loop outside of the work area. These poses are six frames apart, so I'll backup six frames from this first pose, which is identical to this pose, and backup one key frame from their, copy paste, then I'll go to this key frame forward six frames, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, this key frame is identical to this, so I need to go to the post directly after that, copy paste. Now that loop is extended, I can offset the rotation. I'll select all the key frames and offset both of them forward at least one frame, we'll start there. Then I'll select the head and offset that one more frame, and we'll rum preview. I can tell that the offset is there, but again, it's pretty subtle. I'm going to offset it one more frame, Shifts, select the belly rotation and offset that one more frame. I think offsetting both of these forward two frames, is throwing everything out of sync, but I like the offset of the head's rotation from the belly's rotation to B2 frames. I'm just going to back up both of these up two frames. So the belly's rotation lines up with everything else, but the head's rotation is still offset by two frames. Yeah, I think that syncs up much better. With that, my work cycle is complete.
17. Speed Test: I'm going to put him into another comp and have him walk across the screen just to see how quickly he's moving. Switch back to my standard layout, zoom this to fit, drag this comp into a new comp and rename it Stu-WalkCycle, and as I do that, I just noticed I did not duplicate my comp before I went from key poses to the tween version. If you caught that, I'm glad you were paying attention, I actually wish that I would have done that so that I could have compared the key poses of this walk cycle, to the key poses of Trevor. But sometimes you make mistakes, there's nothing you can really do about it, so my bad, but let that be a lesson. You should always backup your comps so you can always go back to them if you ever need to. I'll open up my walk cycle comp, resize it to 800 by 600, 24 frames per second, background is white that's fine. I will scale this way down, probably something around there, and it turn fast draft off, change it to final quality, just so it looks a bit nicer. Then let's see what's the first frame we need to start on, it would be frame 20. I will enable time remapping by coming right clicking go into time, enable time remapping. Set a keyframe on frame 20, go back into that comp and find where the last frame would be. Here we are in frame 44, I'll set a keyframe, get rid of the first and last keyframes that the time remapping enabled, back these two keyframes up to the front of the layer, Option or Alt click on the stopwatch and type in loop, out, open parentheses, close parentheses, and then click Off. Now I've got a repeating loop for this animation. I need to start with him off screen, I'll start right about here, I'll set a position keyframe by holding Option or Alt, pressing P on the keyboard, then l move forward maybe 200 frames and put them on the other side of the screen, set my work area and ram preview to see how quickly that's making him walk, and it looks like he's not moving quite fast enough cross the screen. I'll take this down to maybe a 150, set my work area again, ram preview, that's better but his feet are still slipping just a little bit. If I zoom in here and ram preview again, you can see his feet are slipping, they're not staying in place. It will probably be much easier to tell this if I add in my grid, so I add a new solid by pressing Command or Control Y clicking Okay, coming to my effects presets and typing in grid. Adding the grid effect, change it to size from not the corner point, but the width slider, change the color to maybe a gray, put it below Stu ram preview and you can see that those heels are not sticking where they need to be. I will bring this in even further, ram preview, and that looks like it might have been perfect. Let me zoom in here and switch to full quality, will ram preview again and this time it's definitely going to take longer because it's full resolution and it looks like his feet if I maybe played just this part right here and zoom in, it's feet are slipping just slightly forward. I need to add a few frames between these two position values. I'm going to have the second position keyframe selected and hold Option or Alt, and tap the right arrow key a few times to push it forward in time and it looks like that was perfect. Now I can ram preview between these two points, I'll turn off my grid, zoom to fit, and there we have it. Stu is walking across the screen. I hope that was a little bit eye opening to see what you can do with just little details to change the way that your character presents himself as he walks.
18. Fixing My Mistake: So after I finished animating Stu, I couldn't get over something that looks strange about his walk, and it took me so long to realize his arms are swinging in the wrong direction. As his left leg goes back, so does his left arm. And that's the opposite of what it's supposed to be. If you caught that, awesome. For some reason, I always have trouble on this first pose, remembering to swing the arms in the opposite direction that the legs are. Fortunately, this won't be too hard to fix. All I need to do is zoom in to my key-frames for the arms and offset them by 12 frames. Because if you remember, each one of these arm swings is 12 frames apart. So if I select all of my arms key-frames, and offset this forward by 12 frames, now they should be in sync, except that I don't have enough frames on this side to continue the loop. So the next thing I need to do is select this last set of key-frames for each arm, go to the first key-frame and backup 12 frames, and then move this pose to that point, holding shift to snap to that frame. Now if I run preview, the arms are now swinging in the right direction at the right time, and that's all there is to it.
19. Allan's Walk Overview: So instead of walking you through my entire animation process again for this last character, I've gone ahead and animated him and I'm just going to walk you through the things that made him a little bit unique compared to the other two characters. So here's my complete set of key poses just before I would go to tween. The first thing you'll notice that's different about this character is that its arms are rigid. There is no bend to his forearm or upper arm, but I animated them the exact same way. I switched from IK to FK and then I animated those properties exactly the same. The difference is because his arms are made up of individual layers instead of one single layer, his arms aren't bendy, they're straight and only bend at the joints. In terms of animation, that didn't make a difference for this walk cycle. Now another element of Allan that's different from the other two characters is that he has a neck. So if I back up to my neutral pose and grab his head controller and pull it up, you see that we've got this neck connecting his head to the body and if I take a look at his COG controllers, you see that I have more rotation control. So for one I can rotate his head controller, but then I go to his COG, I could also rotate his neck, I could also rotate its belly and then I could also rotate the COG itself. So there's a much greater range of motion in terms of bending his rig and his key poses I took advantage of that. You see on the first contact pose his head is rotated four degrees backwards, then his neck is 10.5, his belly is 12 and then its COG is actually rotated six degrees forward. My goal with this pose was to make this nice arch that flows through his body from the top of his head all the way to his foot and on the passing position, I did the opposite. His hips are rotated backwards, his belly forward, his neck forward, all the way up to his head, forward. So I've got a curve going the opposite direction on the passing poses. For his feet, you'll see that they don't rotate and that's because I don't have a separate layer for a foot coming off. His legs and feet are much more like an elephant's. So I didn't have to animate the rotation of those at all, just the position. Let me play back my key poses so you can get an idea of what this walk cycle is going to look like. I rotated his head a lot and I was doing that just to try and put as much life into his walk as possible and then I moved on to tweening those keyframes. I took out all the keyframes I didn't need. I added easing to some of the elements and that ended up looking like this. From there, I wanted to see how quickly he was walking across the screen. So I made a speed test and it looked like this. Now as you can see, his movement is very slow. I didn't want him to take so long to walk across the screen, so I went back and I tried moving all the keyframes closer together. The problem with that was that to get him to walk across the screen at the speed I wanted, the animation was moving so quickly that it just looked really bad. So I went back to my tweening animation and I had an idea to try and moving his legs twice as fast as the rest of his body. To do that, I went down to his feet and I duplicated the loop. I just selected all of these keyframes, copy and paste and then same thing for the other foot, copy paste and what I wanted to happen was for all of these key frames to take place within my loop area. So what I did to make that happen was selected all the keyframes, hold down Option or Alt on a PC and then clicked and dragged on one of the last key frames. This allows you to proportionately stretch all of your keyframes. So basically I'm just compressing all of these keyframes down into this time so that twice the motion happens in the same time frame. Now if I run preview, you see that his legs are moving twice as fast. But it actually doesn't look bad because the rest of his body is moving at a regular rhythm. From there, I built in some overlap to his individual elements and that looked like this. I also added in some up and down movement to his head, just to add a little bit more movement and finally emit a comp and timed out the speed for his walk and it ended up looking like this. I was pretty happy with the result. This character presented some pretty unique challenges because his body proportions were so different from a regular character. He had these very long arms, but extremely short legs. So he wasn't able to take a stride nearly as long as the other characters in proportion to the rest of his body. So don't be afraid to try things that might not make sense in your head. Test stuff out and see what it looks like because you might end up with something that works really well.
20. Thanks!: Congratulations for making it through all of those videos. I know it was a lot to take in, but now you can go back and apply what you learned to your own Character Rig. Feel free to share any part of the process. If you want to post your key poses and get feedback from me, I'm more than happy to do that. I cannot wait to see your characters walking. If you need instructions on how to post your animations to your project page, go check out part one, which the link is in the notes of the video right here, and just scroll down to the video where I show how to export out of after effects and create a looping gift and Photoshop. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope that you had as much fun taking it as I did creating it and I would love it if you left me a review. If you post your work anywhere online, be sure to tag me on any social media sites @jakeinmotion. As always, if you have any questions, just go to the community page and ask me on the Ask Me Anything thread. I'm here to help and I want you to be happy with your own animations. Thanks again, and I'll see you in part three.
Jake Bartlett, Motion Designer
