Blender 3D: Your First Character Animation (Walk Cycle)

1. Intro: Girl. Hi. I'm Southern Shadi. I'm a professional artist with over ten years of experience, working with Fortune 500 companies that range from everything from Game Dev to film to tech. I also run an educational Blinder YouTube channel with a quarter million subscribers and just recently released my short film, which has been making it into festivals. Welcome to this course. You'll gain essential professional skills that are pivotal for any three D artists. We'll dive into Blinders animation tools, master keyframe techniques, and explore rig controls. Skills are not just about creating a walk cycle, but instead they form the foundation of character animation, a critical aspect of professional three D work. By the end of this class, you'll have a polished walk cycle animation to showcase in your portfolio, but more importantly, you'll have acquired industry relevant skills that will set you apart as an animator. Whether you're just starting or looking to refine your technique, this course is designed to enhance your professional journey in three D animation, whether it be game dev, motion design, film, or tech. If you're new to blender, I highly recommend first checking out my your first day in blender three D course. But that's enough talking. Let's dive in and get to the fun part where we start animating. 2. Getting to Know the Tools: I cover this more in depth in my animation class and blender with your first animation and blender. However, I'm going to do a brief overview of the tools here, including the various modes and kind of the timeline and things like that. If you're already familiar with all of these tools, you can go ahead and just skip this lesson. But let's dive in for those that are getting into this for the first time. First is a timeline as attributed here to the light gray portion. You can set the range of your timeline over here with the start and the end numbers, and so also determine what frames are rendered when you go to render your animation. I can play forward here, I can play backwards, I can go to the first frame, the last frame, or I can skip in between key frames of the selected object. Here, you'll see that I have several key frames, and I can actually grab those keyframes with G and move those around, or I can grab all those keyframes and scale them from wherever the cursor is. I can drag this cursor back and forth to scrub the timeline. And if I click away from my object, you'll see that those keyframes disappear because it will only display the key frames of the selected objects in the timeline. Now here, we have the auto keying So if I go ahead and click that auto keying on, and I'm going to open my panel here, and I grab this object and move it around, you'll see that it'll begin applying automatic keyframes to whatever I did. So since I did a grab motion, it applied it to all locations. And if I went ahead and did a rotation, it would apply it to all rotations. I'm going to undo that. And if I come here under a key, I can choose an active keying set, so I can set it to location, rotation, or available. So if I set it to available, and then I come over here, I turn on only active keying set. Now when I hit rotation, rather than adding a rotation to all keyframes, it will only add it to the keyframes that already has a keyframe on it, and then now when I move it, it will reset those other motions back. So you can see how this is a very powerful and simple tool to use. Now, if you are having trouble with the playback, you can come under playback here, and instead of play every frame, you can do frame dropping. What that will do is that will drop frames to try and get you as close to the scene frame rate as you can. In this case has 24 frames a second. However, you will be dropping frames, which means you may not see every frame play back. This is useful if you're on a lower end machine, or if you're working in a complicated scene, and you're not able to play back your animation in real time by playing every frame. Now up here, we have the dope sheet editor. This will display animation for all objects within a scene, and you can see here that it also has this cube action. Blender has an action editor, and this allows you to store various actions. For example, you can make a running action, a jump action, and then you could switch over to the NLA editor, and you can mix those. That's something that I did on my Al animation, which I'm displaying on screen right here. We will not be covering that in this course, but just so you know that is an option that you can do within the dope sheet. What we'll be using the dope sheet for is adjusting key frames. So you may wonder why this is useful when we already have the timeline down here. Well, up here, as I said, we can display all objects in a scene. If I go ahead and duplicate this cube, you can see that now we have both cubes in the scene. Or if I come up here and click Show only selected, then it will only show the selected objects that appear over here. So that's very useful. However, the great thing about the dope sheet is that what we can do is we can grab these objects, and we can twirl down, and then we can adjust the key frames of every individual element. Something we're not able to do here. So here I can go ahead and grab the Zuler rotation and move that forward. And you can see that now I've adjusted the keyframes of just the rotation. Thing that I couldn't control with just the timeline. Now, up here, you're going to see the graph editor. Now, the graph editor has a lot of controls. We can add modifiers. So if I grab this rotation here, I press N and bring out this panel. You'll see that we can add modifiers. I'm going to add a noise modifier. And now when I hit play, you'll see that it is creating a noise on that system right there, and we have plenty of controls. I'm going to go ahead and turn that off there. The other great thing about the graph editor is that we can control the easing. So right now, you'll see that we have the Z location, if I zoom in on this. You can see here that this is a bezier curve. So if I go ahead and grab this easing here and scale this out, you see how it hangs at the top more before dropping down. So this is great for being able to polish your animations and adjust with a graph. Now, just like the dope sheet, you can hide individual elements over here. You can select them by double clicking them. And when you have them selected, you can also press period, and what that will do is zoom your view in. So if I select everything here, which is going to be your default view, you'll see that we can't see our location at all. So if I want to adjust the graph key frames of the location, what I would want to do is double click the Z location, and I can press period to zoom in. Now, if you want to hide all animations aside from the one that you have selected, you can grab the one you have selected and hit shift H, and that will hide every other graph. This is a lot more useful when we begin working in more complex character animation scenes. You can see here in my short film animation that when I have a lot of animations going on on the scene or even just on my character, how complicated these graphs can get. So understanding how to focus in On the elements you want to adjust is a really important part of animation. Now, what we're doing here in the walk cycles will be pretty simple. So try not to get intimidated because I promise you we won't be doing anything with graphs quite this crazy. You're probably aware that blender has multiple modes, which can be changed up here, object edit and pose mode. Object mode will allow you to grab objects within the scene and move them around. Edit mode, will allow you to tab in and edit the mesh. But since we're working with characters, we actually have another mode when selecting armature called pose mode. So this is where we will be doing all of our animation. This is where we can pose the armature rig. And record our animated key frames. So this will be how we will be animating our character in pose mode. This differs from edit mode, where in edit mode, we're actually altering the armature and the rig. If you've never heard those terms before, the armature is what blender calls objects that refer to character rigs. So the armature is all the bones and the components that make up a character rig, which are then attached to a character model. And then able to be animated. These are then controlled from this modifier here where we attach our character to the armature, in this case, which we have called the Watermelon girl rig. So that's a bit about how to switch into pose mode. Now, the other thing to be hyper aware of when we are working in pose mode is your screen space. So here you see global, and we will have our transform gizmos. So I'm going to just select all of the bones and hide them so that we can only see this hip bone for illustration purposes. And here you see we have the transform gizmo in there, we have our move, our rotate, and our scale. Those work as expected. You can move up and down on the Z, back and forth on the y, or you can rotate those. But what happens when we start moving our character around? You'll notice here that if I move my character over here and start rotating them around, and then I grab the move tool, you'll see that this is still considered up, but this is not up for our character. This is just up in the scene, hence the word global. So global, when global transform orientations are turned on we'll always maintain the coordinates of the world space here. So with global on, up will always be up in comparison to the world. But if I switch to the local, it will change to the bone. And now you can see that the up has rotated to match the bone, and thus when we do up, it will do up focused on our character. Be switching between these spaces, but it's important to understand the difference. In short, to make it as simple as possible, global transform will make it always so that x, y, and z are always going the same direction. Local will orient those to the selected bone. By understanding the difference between those two, your animation process will be quite a bit smoother. When we look at animations, we also need to understand the terminology of a keyframe verson in between keyframe. In traditional two D animation, a keyframe refer to any key pose that a character made. So the lead animator would go through and draw all the key frames, and then the beginner animators or inexperienced animators would then go through and draw all the in between frames. And those are the two types of keyframes you may hear me referring to. Now with computer animation, we insert the keyframes, and it tries to fill in all the between animation for us. However, during the polishing phase, we may find that we want to go in and make slight adjustments to those in between frames, and thus we insert a keyframe. Now, this is where it gets a bit confusing. Because with computer animation, any frame that has animation data stored on it like this is referred to as a key frame. However, this would still be considered an in between frame because it is in between our key poses. So I just wanted to make that clarification, because as we move forward, some of the terminology I may use might confuse you if you didn't understand that. 3. Exploring the Rig: Before we get started, I just want to show you the character rigs that we have here. Now, we have two character rigs included. We have the cat and the pants. I'm just going to walk you through the cat because they use the same rigging system on both. So if you understand how to use the cat, you'll also understand how to use the pants, which is the same thing minus the upper body. Now, this was rigged using a tool called rigipi, which is free and included in blender. Have a tutorial on how to rig this character here, if you'd like to watch it, and that might help you understand the system better. Now, when you work with rigs like this, they're going to be complicated and have a lot of various layers. By default, I'll have all the layers you need turned on and off on. So if you just want to open and follow along, you can do that. However, if you want to experiment with the rig more, you can turn those layers off in one of two places. One is over here on the right side. Under the armature tab, you can twirl this down. This is kind of the primary way to deal with bone groups, and you can see all the various options that we have here to turn them on and off and to star them and to slo them. The other way is that if you open the end panel by pressing the end button here, you will see that we have the various rig layers here. By go ahead and turn all those on, you can see how complicated our rig works. We're going to go through each one of these and break down what they are. So let's start with just the root bone. The root bone here is something that controls the entire rig and where everything is posed, so by moving the root bone, we move all other bones. And that's why it's called the root bone. If I turn on the leg IK, what IK stands for is inverse kinematics. And what that means is that it will automatically move the leg for you when you move the foot up and down. When you move that foot up and down with the foot control, you can also further control the upper hip and rotation by playing with this upper thigh bone here as well. Now, you'll notice that there's these IK and F K systems. That gets pretty complicated, but I am going to show you how to switch between those two systems. Right now with this entire bone selected, if I hit R and Alt G, what that will do is just reset everything back to its default position. So let's go ahead and look at what an IK system is. So if I go ahead and grab this bone down here, you'll see up here that we have K to foot and all these various controls, with everything sitting here in its default position, if I change this IK foot from zero, to one, it will switch from an inverse kinematic system to a ford kinematic system. I can then come down here and I can turn that leg forward kinematic system on, and you see that we get a new set of controls. And these work very differently. If I grab the foot bone here, you see that it only moves the foot bone. So essentially, this poses the same way that an action figure does. It's not as easy to animate with, but under certain actions and circumstances, this can be very helpful if you want to put the leg a specific way or a certain place. For now, I'm just going to go ahead and reset all of that by again pressing all R and all G. You'll notice these tweak bones, and what these tweak bones are are little bones that allow you to kind of tweak in between your poses, so you can go ahead and move things around and scale them up. So if you're trying to do some really cartoony loony tunes work, you could go ahead and pose your bone and then use these to further tweak it to either adjust your leg or to create some really exaggerated poses. Now, the arm as an IK and an FK system, it works exactly the same way. We will be using the inverse kinematic version here, and that will just control the hand and the arms. Likewise, you can do the same exact thing with the FK system. Torso Tweak will do the same exact thing, and arm tweak will do the same exact thing as leg tweaks, giving us more controls. Turning on the torso here. You can see that I've put a few controls under here. We have the torso control here. This is our hip that will control our hip of our character, and you can see that those ligaments with the IK system on are automatically moving with it. So that's our torso there, and then we have our hips, which will control just the hips within the torso. We also have some bones up here, including the neck and the chest, and we can use these to kind of adjust the chest. Here we have the shoulders, which will allow us to rotate shoulders. Since this character is kind of like a very, like dense, tiny little character, you're not going to need to use things like the shoulders and things as much. You're mostly just going to be using this control right here, which is the head control. And you can see that controls their head, and up here, these control the ears. And then lastly, we have one more control back here, which will control the sword, so you can make that bounce around if you want as well. So, that should be all you need to follow along in this tutorial to use the character. I'll make sure to call out everything as I'm using it so that hopefully it's easy for you to follow along. If you have any trouble, make sure to ask questions in the discussion section, but let's dive in and begin animating our characters. 4. Breaking Down a Walk Cycle: Going to be breaking down a walk cycle to its most basic components. And by understanding these basic core elements, you'll be able to create any walk cycle that you want. I'd also like to dive into some additional educational resources. Now, Scale Share has a lot of classes on animation. I have several courses here on animation in Blender as well that you may find useful. I'd also like to recommend some books that I reference a lot when animating. The first book I'd like to recommend is cartoon animation with Preston Blair, which is a great book about character animation and different character designs and how they can affect the animation. Not familiar with Preston Blair. He is one of the classic Disney animators with a lot of great films on his credit list. Now the next book I'd like to recommend is the Illusion of Life from Disney Animation. This book is famous for really summarizing and establishing the 12 core principles of animation, which you might be familiar with. It was written by Ollie and Frank, and they are two famous Disney animators from the classic era of Disney Animation, and they talk about how they utilize these animation principles to create those early animated films. This is an incredibly helpful book for any form of animation. Lastly, the book I use the most and the most relevant to this class is the Animator survival kit by Richard E Williams. He's famous for animating Roger Rabbit, if you're familiar with that film. And in this book, he has an incredible breakdown of animation in general, but specifically a huge portion of the book is dedicated to the walk cycle. Lot of the terminology and things we are using will have been defined in this book, and I highly recommend having this book, even if you don't want to read it, it's great just to have as a reference for all the various walk cycles that it has on display. Diving into the actual basic components of a walk cycle now, I have this example seen here. I've drawn this line here to represent the ground. I've drawn this line up here to represent the headline, which is the basic headline of our character. And then I've made the front leg red and the back leg blue to further make it easier to illustrate these poses. Down here on the timeline, you'll see that I have various markers that go from contact down, past position, and up. After that, it begins to repeat. These are the four basic poses of any walk cycle. If these poses are in your walk cycle, you'll have a pretty solid foundation, and from there, you can begin making adjustments to make your walk cycle unique to your character. Diving into what each one of these poses is. Now, first here, we have the contact pose. That is defined by saying that this is the moment when 1 ft contacts the ground while the other is about to lift off. So here you can see that the front leg is coming down into contact while the back leg is about to kick off the ground. At this moment, both beat are in contact with the ground with the leading leg fully extended. And this is why it's called the contact pose because both beat are on the ground at the same time. You'll also notice here that with the character's headline, it is matched at the headline. Here. Now, moving forward in the walk cycle to the down position. The body lowers itself as the weight shifts onto the leading leg. So you can see here that as we lead down the front leg here, which is the leading leg in this scenario is starting to take the weight of the character, and the trailing leg is beginning to lift off the ground. So in that case, that's the back leg here and it is lifting off the ground. At this point, the body here is at the lowest point in the cycle. That's why it's called the down pose because as you see here, we're about a full half a head lower than the headline up here. Moving forward to the pass position here, you'll see that the trailing leg, which has been our back leg passes the leading leg for the first time. And this is as it is moving forward. The body then rises back up to the headline or close to the headline as the leight shifts onto the leading leg here. This is the moment when one leg is fully under the body supporting the weight. So you'll notice here that our front leg is taking all the weight while the back leg is passing forward to shift to the front. Now moving on to Of course, you'll notice that the head has passed the headline and thus the name of this pose, which is called the up pose, and the body reaches its kind of highest point in the cycle, and the leading leg starts to extend preparing for contact in the ground in the back. While the trailing leg is pushing off and beginning to swing forward so that it can make contact in the next. Now moving forward to contact. What we should have at this point is the same exact pose but reversed. So if I click here, you'll see that we have the same exact poses, both the front and the back leg reversed. And then the poses just repeat themselves with the front and back leg reversed, as you can see here. Now, this last contact is just the same exact frame, so that's just a repeating frame. With those four poses, you can just flip them, duplicate them, and then repeat them. So you can see with this very basic breakdown, a walk cycle can go from an intimidating animation ask to just a simple four poses that you have to get with your character. And after that, you can just copy and paste and repeat your walk cycle. When played back in motion, you can see how they just mirror one another. So walk cycles as complicated as they may seem are actually pretty simple when broken down. Now, let's begin by actually animating a walk cycle ourself using the same exact rig. 5. General Walk Cycle Project: Point, you should open the leg walk cycle start file so that you can follow along with this lesson. Now, know that I've switched my keyboard shortcut from F two to space bar for search, and all other keyboard shortcuts will show up down here. If you're struggling to follow along, just look down here and follow my button presses. Getting started here on our rig, what we're going to do is press the n key here to open the panel. Come up here to item and make sure that you are in pose mode. So just grab your object here and you can hold tab to switch to pose mode or you can switch up here. You recall earlier, I showed that with the auto keying, we could set active keying sets. So we're going to set up our rig to do that to make animation a little bit faster. So first, what we're going to do is grab the foot here, this foot I K bone. We're going to come up to the location. Right click and insert keyframes. Right click and insert key frames. So we're going to do that on both the location and the rotation. We will do that for both feet. Next, we're going to grab this bone back here, which is the heel bone. And we are going to insert keyframes on the rotation. So I'm just right clicking and inserting key frames there. Up here, we're going to grab the torso bone, which is the box. We're going to insert keyframes on the location of that. And then we are going to also insert keyframes on the rotation. Lastly, we will grab the hip, and we are going to insert rotation key frames. Now, if we come down here, we can turn on auto keying, and I'm going to grab the only active keying set, make sure that is checked on. And then over here under keying, we're going to grab keying, and we're going to turn it on to available. And now what that is going to do is only insert keyframes on the layers that we have already inserted keyframes. Now, if you didn't have your cursor set to one, you're going to have a random keyframe just floating out here. So what you can do to fix that is just press A to select everything. You'll see that it's all selected when it's blue, which means that we will have our keyframes down here. Click and drag over that and press G, and just move that to the first frame. Now we're going to move to the first frame and begin inserting our poses. Now I find it easiest to split this window into two views here, and we're going to put one in the front view. So I'm just going to press one on the number pad there. And then I'm going to put this one in the side view. So you can press three and view it from this angle, or if you hit control three, you can view it from this angle, which is what I'm going to do. Don't need these windows open, so I'm just going to press in and close those, and with that, we are ready to begin animating. Now, one thing I like to do to make this a little easier is I grab the annotate button here, and I'm just going to click and drag here so that we have a line there. And now this is going to be our headline, which we can use to reference for the rest of the animation. So I'm going to use this view over here just to grab me controls. I'm going to grab the front foot there, and we're going to start with the contact position. So we're going to move this out a bit further there and I'm going to grab this foot, and we're going to move this foot back. Now we can grab the heel here, and just by pressing G, we can go ahead and move that. And I'm just going to rotate that slightly so that it looks like our foot is up. And you can just continue to move this back a little bit to straighten out that leg. So you want to make sure that the feet are staying flat on the ground, which in this case, we're just going to use this grid line right here for the y axis. Now, let's grab this foot here, and for the contact, we actually want this foot to be angled upwards. So we will grab that, and we will just move that hip upwards just like that. And you can adjust this foot a bit more if you want to try and straighten out the leg. But I'm going to leave this as our pose currently. Now let's go to the downpse. So you'll see here that I have marked everything for you. So I will move forward to frame four here, and we will create the downpse. So first, to do this, what we're going to do is grab our torso here. Now, typically, when you're going on the headline, and you're on your downpse, you're gonna be about half a head or a full head below. Now, in this case, this little hip rate here kind of represents our head. So we can just move that down about half that distance. And you can see there now our legs are already starting to bend. So let's make adjustments now. We'll grab this foot over here, and we're going to move this back on the y. And now the weight is kind of shifting into that leg. So we will grab this right here, the heel bone, and if you hit R, that will reset the rotation there. And you can just make sure that that foot is just sitting flat right there. So that's kind of the pose we're looking for on that front leg. Now, at this back leg here, we want the heel to be lifting a bit more as it's kind of starting to come off the ground. It can kind of keep its position here, but we will grab this leg here, and I'm just going to press G there and just rotate that so that knee is starting to come in a bit more. So to can see from this frame to this frame how we are dropping down and shifting our weight. Now moving on to the past position, we will scoot forward here. And now what we want to do is straighten our leg back up and put all the weight on it. So we are going to grab our torso and on the pass position, the torso head position should go up past the head. So we will move this up so that it moves past the head there. And now we can grab our foot here, and we want this to be directly under and pulled back just slightly. So now all the weight is on that, and so that this light can pass through with no weight on it. So you can grab this, and if you want, you can rotate this a tiny bit, but I'm going to leave my foot just completely flat there. Now, we're going to grab this back foot here, and we're going to lift it off the ground so that the knee bends. And this is the character carrying the foot through. So since they're not putting their weight on their toe, this toe should just be extended out. So I will grab the heel here, and we will press alt r, and what that's going to do is just reset the position of the foot. But we can grab the foot here, and now we can hit r to rotate the foot bone, not the heel bone, and we can kind of extend this foot so it's pointing downwards. Now, we have a cartoon character here with very long feet, so that means that we're going to kind of have to adjust a get a proper pose. So we'll go and just pull that foot up around there. So this is the position you're looking for. The head is slightly above the headline. All the weight is on this leg right here, and it is flat footed. And now that allows because there's all the weight is on here, that gets their character, the balance that then bring this foot and pass it across the leg. So this is kind of the positioning you're looking for in the pass through. Now let's move to the up position. So we can see how that is looking here from frame to frame. Perfect. Then we will come to the up position here. And now at the up position will be at our maximum height above the head here. So we will move the headline up even further, and we're going to take this front foot here, and we're going to move this foot back so that it's extended. We're going to grab that heel, and we're going to rotate it this way so that it's kind of pushing up on the tipy toe. So what's essentially happening here is they are taking this leg and kicking back and now all that weight has fallen into that toe so that they can then drag this foot forward. So we will bring this foot forward, and we will rotate it forward, because now what's happening is they are swinging this foot forward, and they're bracing to put all their weight on this foot. So we'll grab this foot here, move it forward to around there. Now, here, I have accidentally put some key frames on frame nine and some on ten, and this is a good example of how we can just fix things simply with this timeline. So what I'm going to do is press A to select all bones. Lock in drags. I've only selected that frame, and I'm going to press G and just move that forward one frame. And now everything is tidy on this frame. This is the frame that we are looking for for this pose. So now we have our contact pose, our down poses, our pass pose, and our up pose. As we script through here, you can see that we're starting to get a pretty natural walk cycle. Now what we're going to do is use a feature called copy Pose flip, and that will allow us to insert the rest of these key frames pretty quickly. Let's take a look at how to use that. Now, you see here, we have the contact pose, and I have all these labeled. So with the first frame selected here, we're going to press A to select all of our visible bones. We're going to go to Pose copy pose. Now we're going to go to the next contact frame, in which case we want to see this same exact frame but flipped with the front and the back leg. Now, if I come to this frame here, frame 13, which is also labeled contact, I do pose, pace pose flipped. It will pace that exact pose flipped from the front and the back leg there. And you can see there. It's a little hard to tell in this gray mat mode. So now we can see that as we go through, we get a full walk, and we can actually do that for the rest of these frames. So we'll come here to the down pose. Keep everything selected, do copy pos, come to the down pose, and do pace pose flipped. Now, a trick you can do to make this even faster is you can go to Pos, and you can do copy pos, and you can right click and add to Quick favorites and right click and add to Quick favorites. Now, once you've done that, what you can do is just press Que in your window, and all the things that you have added to your Quick favorites will be there. So I'm going to do copy Pos there and bring this over to the past position. Pace pose flipped. Again, I will repeat that with the pose, and I'm going to do a copy pose there. And then on this up pose, I'm going to do a pace pose flipped. Now, if we come back to this contact frame, we need this to be at the end frame so that our lock cycle loops. So you can do copy pose, but rather than doing pace pose flipped, we can just do a normal pace pose. So we'll come back down here to the last frame, which is 25, and that's because we need to leave it at 24 so there's not a jump by having a double frame, and we will come here and do pace pose, which will mimic that first frame. Now when we hit play, you can see that we are getting a basic wok cycle. Just by inserting those keyframes and using pace post slip, you can see how quickly we move through this. Let's look at a couple of ways we can quickly improve this. So let's add a little rotation in the hips. We will come up here to the three D viewport, and we're going to change this to graph editor. Now, I have it set so that it only shows my selected items. So if you click this right here so that it is highlighted and grab your torso or your hips there, you'll see how it only shows the keyframes there. Now, currently, we don't really have any key frames on the hip that we're actually using. I select everything here with A and press period and Zoom in. You can see it's a flat line because we didn't adjust the rotation at all. So let's switch to front view over here. And then what we're going to do is add some rotation to the hips. So up here, make sure you are set to local. And then if we grab the rotate here, we can see to rotate the hips to the left and the light, we need to rotate on the green here, which in blender the green means y. So we'll be able to add a little bit of rotation to the hips by adding some animation to the Y. So let's make sure that we're only seeing the Y axis. We'll grab y here and hit shift H. And then we will only see the key frames for that. Now, we have a bunch of keyframes here that are kind of useless, so we can actually just start over by grabbing all the keyframes here to the right and hitting delete key frames. Now we only have that first key frames of the hip, which is set to the first frame. Now, we're going to add a rotation key frame to turn the hip towards whatever leg has the weight on it. So here in a contact pose, you can see that the weight is evenly distributed on both legs. So we're actually going to leave that hip center, and we can go to the next contact pose, and if we hit click, that will just insert a keyframe there, and we can do that on the last one as well. Now, what we can do is look at our frames here. So if we come to this pass through pose here, we'll see that all of our weight is being put on one leg. So let's switch back to front view mode here. What we're actually going to do is grab this y rotate here, and we're just going to rotate a bit so that all the hip is leaning in and putting its weight on one leg. And you can see there now that we have that key frame. Now it's come to the other pass through, and now all the weight is being put on this leg. So let's just rotate the hip that way, so it looks like we're shifting all the weight there. If I zoom out and hit play here, you can see that we're getting a much more interesting walk cycle as the hip is bouncing back and forth. So that's kind of the basics of a general walk cycle. Now, one more thing that you can do to polish up your scene is if you come up here to the dope sheet editor and we select everything, we'll see that it's pretty clean here, but as we open it up, we just have lots of key frames that we're not actually using. So what you can do is you can come up here to key, and you can look for clean key frames. Now, this will clean all the key frames and remove the ones that are unnecessary. And if we hit play here, it should still give us our same exact walk cycle. Perfect. And with that, we have a complete general walk cycle and we'll all you to look at something more advanced. Now, one last thing you could do to polish up this walk cycle is you may notice that as you move forward here, the toe, because we have such large cartoon feet is actually dipping through the ground. This is actually a pretty simple fix. If we open the end panel here and we grab our foot, we can right click here and insert key frames on this toe control right here. And then as we move forward, we can rotate this toe control up so that it doesn't intercept the ground. And then we can just hit t r and move that key frame forward. And you see now it doesn't pass through the ground. So you can do this on both sides, and that'll just give you a slightly cleaner walk cycle, as you can see there as it's not moving through the ground anymore. So while we are still here in the graph editor, let's look at one more thing we can tweak with the torso here. So if we grab the torso here, we know that the majority of our motion is just on the up and down. So I'm going to grab the move controller here, and with the local axis, we'll see that it is blue. So up and down on the torso is the blue axis, which you see here is the Z location. Now, the only thing we're animating on this torso is the Z location. So we can actually just delete these other ones over here. I'm just grabbing those and pressing x. And then I can grab everything here with A and press period on the numpad, and that'll zoom out so that we can see our view here. Now, you can go ahead and do this on any bone and really start to tweak and polish the settings. And they say of keeping it simple, we're just going to focus on the torso. So I'm going to grab this torso here, and we're going to look at all the keyframes we have here. So we can see here that this middle keyframe isn't of much use to us. It's just on the graph and it's not affecting anything. So I can go ahead and delete that keyframe and just create a slightly cleaner walk. You could also potentially do the same thing for these key frames. And with that, you can see that we have less keyframes on our torso, but we still have the same motion. Now what we can do is we can scale these. So by scaling this easing here, we will make it so that it comes in faster and then remains slower. So you can see what that looks like here as it caches the animation here. You can see how it's hanging there a little bit more. You see how it's hanging up in the air a bit more. So that's an example of how you can adjust the easing to create a more kind of delightful or poppy animation. We want to make sure that we do it on all of those so it kind of sits up high and low. So let's grab all of these key frames here. We'll come up to the individual centers. And what that is going to do is scale them all by their individual centers rather than as a group. So now when I scale these, it will scale all of them individually. So, with all of them selected and individual centers turned on, I will just hit the S key and just drag out so that they have a little bit more hang time there. Now if I go ahead and hit play here, you'll see that now we're getting a little bit more of kind of a cartoony up and down motion. And just like that, we have a fairly polished walk cycle, and we're ready to learn how to do something a little bit more advanced. 6. Analyzing Other Walks: Far, we've gone through a generic walk cycle, and upcoming, we're going to look at how to do this animate inspired run cycle with this cat adventure project file that we have included. But I think it's important to note that the nine core elements that we went through when breaking down a walk cycle will appear in all of these walk cycles in some form or fashion. By just doing minor alterations, we can get wildly different and unique results. So before we move into the cat adventure and creating this run cycle, I also wanted to show you some other walk cycles and how all walk cycles basically have these four basic key poses that we've discussed earlier, and how those can just be modified to create different variations to create unique walk cycles. Now, looking at one example here from my short film with the main character Watermelon girl, you'll notice that whenever she walks anywhere, she essentially waddles, and whenever she runs anywhere, she's basically skipping. This is very intentional for two reasons. One being her personality, and that's important in your walk cycle. She's supposed to be childlike in nature, and thus I wanted her to move a bit more like a toddler. Uneasy in how she walked places wobbling and losing her balance and very excited when she's running and skipping around. But there's also the physical element of the character that you need to consider too. Watermelon girl is a big giant character with a little tiny legs. So when it came to her up and down position, she didn't have as much room to go up and down. So you'll notice that there's not much up and down in terms of her head. And for past position, it's hard to get those little legs past each other. So what ends up happening is she ends up kind of pivoting on each leg and kind of waddling as her whole body ends up kind of turning to account for her little tiny legs that can't carry her places as fast as she needs to go. Now, here's an example of the opposite extreme I have a character with long, stretchy legs that can bend and turn around anyway. Now, when you look at this walk cycle, you might think that it's much more complicated than the generic walk cycle, but it's really not. Let's look at each one of these poses really quickly here. If I come to the side here, you can see that we have our basic contact pose, and we move into that down and that pass position. And that up pose before we land back onto a contact. So you can see there there's not much there that differs in terms of poses. But where the difference comes into place is if I switch in a front view here, what I did here is on the pass pose, I just went into the front view and lifted the character's leg up and rotated it out a bit. That's all I did. And just by doing that, it ends up giving this character this rubber hose, kind of old classic Disney style animation look. So you can see how just altering one or two of the key poses with just a few minor things can result in a drastically different outcome. That's just two short examples from some of my personal work. However, if you check out this video by Kevin B Perry, a professional stop motion animator, he created this walk cycle reference video where he does 100 walks in around 6 minutes, and they're all drastically different from one another and show the wide variety of character you can portray through a walk cycle. I'll make sure to link to this in the class resources, and I definitely recommend checking out this video as a reference. 7. Stylized Walk Cycle Project: Next, you're going to want to be using the Cat run walk cycle file, and we're going to be doing a stylized anime run with this cat. And it's going to start largely as the other one. And some things are going to be different because as you see here, our character is a bit simpler, but now they have arms and legs and a head, ears and other things. We're going to be walking through how to animate all of that. Let's dive in and begin with our poses. Let's begin inserting some keyframes on the various controls here. We're going to right click and insert keyframes on the hand control both rotation and location. I also want to call out here that is your keyframes down here. You may possibly see situations where those disappear. That's because you can actually move up and down with the middle mouse button there. If you lose your keyframes down here, you can come to view and frame all and that should put them all back into view. Grab this other hand here. We'll continue to insert our key frames there. We'll grab the head up here. We only need rotation key frames on this one. We'll grab our torso bone. We only need location keyframes on this one. We'll grab our hip bone. We'll only do rotation on this one. We'll grab our feet. We're going to do location and rotation. And you'll notice here that the feet controls are a bit simpler, and that's because we don't have toes to bend back and forth. So you'll notice that we only have little foot controls there. And then we can grab our ears up here and we can insert rotation key frames on those. And this will give us kind of the basis that we need for everything to begin our basic run cycle with this character. So I'm going to split this screen here into two views. I'm going to put one in the front view here, and then I'm going to put one in the side view by hitting control. Three. Then I'm just going to hide my end panel so they're not in the way. So beginning with our contact pose, I'm just going to annotate that headline up there just to have as a reference. And I'm going to grab the Torso first and grab that, make sure that we have our auto keying on and only active keying set. Come over here to keying, make sure it's set to available. And with that, we're ready to begin posing. So we'll grab our front foot here, and we're just going to move this out front. I'm going to turn on the move Gizmo, make sure I'm set to local, and move that forward on the y axis. Then I'm going to grab this back foot here and just move this back. Since we don't have toes or our character, we don't need to worry about rotating those heels as mentioned, but we can still rotate this foot to avoid defamations on the bottom there. So I'm just going to go and bring that up there and make sure that it's kind of matched on the ground. Now let's come to the downpwe. So we'll move forward on the downpwe. And remember, we want to bring the head down. Now, we have a giant head here, so we don't want to do kind of a full head motion down. Otherwise, we're going to end up just flattening our character out. So instead We're just going to bring our character down a tiny bit. You're going to notice the arms moving around, that's okay. We will do those key frames later. Now, what we're going to do is grab our front foot here and put r to re rotate that and kind of just put that down there on the ground. So now that our front leg is kind of squished. And you can see here that because the character has such tiny thick little proportions, that it's making things a little bit easier to work with, but also harder to get. And then let's grab that back foot bone there. And we want this one to kind of start to be bending. So We're just going to move this forward a bit, rotate that a tiny bit, til you just start to get a little bit of a bend there. Now, because our character has such thick, tiny proportions, this isn't going to be as drastic of a bend as it was on our previous character, which had those big long legs. Now let's move forward to the past position here. We want to grab this torso, and we should start begin need to pass this headline. So we'll just bring ourselves up a little bit, kind of extend ourselves. And we really want to be paying attention more to the legs than the head on this character, since it has these short little legs, we need to be kind of mindful that they're doing what we want. So we're going to grab this front foot here and bring that back, so it's straight under the character implying that all the weight is there. Grab this foot, bring it up, rotate until that leg starts to kind of bend. Now, you can see it's a little harder to see the legs there, so feel free to switch between the different views so that you're able to see. Now, let's come to the up pose here. We're going to grab this pose and move this up past the headline, just like that. And with that pose there up in the air, we're going to come back down to our legs and grab this leg here, move this back, so it's just stretched out, and then move this leg forward so that it's kind of bent and leaning forward and rotate that foot so that we're not distorting that. You see here that the leg is really stretching. You can leave that stylistically. That has to do because our character is such short legs, so we can just make that up on the torso slightly less extreme. This is just going to be a stylized decision on your own. So go ahead and grab that pose. Now with that, we can see that we're starting to get the beginning of our walk cycle. Great. So let's begin copying those key frames so we can get a look at our walk cycle. So we'll come to that front frame, and we're just going to repeat that same process as before, copying these poses and past flipping it. I'm going to go ahead and fast forward through this portion. Great. So now we see that we have a walk cycle with our character that is working pretty well. Let's begin making adjustments to improve this and turn it into a run cycle. We're going to do the same thing we did last time. We're going to grab the hip control here, come over to the graph editor, and we will delete everything but that y rotation, so we'll delete the x and the z. After we've deleted that, I'm going to grab all the keyframes here and press period to zoom in. We don't need any of these keyframes over here quite yet, so I'm going to grab all those and hit x to delete. And now we should just have one keyframe here in the beginning. We're going to do the same thing as last time. Move forward to contact, hit R, click. Move here to contact, hit R, click. Now we have three keyframes with the hips neutralized. We'll come to the pass position keyframe. Going to switch in the front view by pressing one, and we're going to rotate that to shift all the weight of the hips to that leg. Come to this pass position. We'll rotate to do there as well. Now when we hit play, we should see that we are starting to get some hip rotation. Things are starting to improve already. But the problem is that things are too slow. So we're going to simply just reduce the speed with scaling our key frames. So I'm going to press A, make sure all the bones here are selected. I'm going to come to the first frame here, and then I'm going to hit S 0.5. What that's going to do is then scale all those keyframes down by 50%. So it'll be half the speed it was before, and it's based off the cursor position. Now, since we just reduced half the key frames, we should cut the end down to half. So we'll go 24-12. Now on a hit play, you'll see that we are moving much faster because all those keyframes are tighter together. Now, these markers that I've put down here for reference will no longer be relevant. If you want, you can scale those down as well. But I'm just going to move forward because we don't really need them for the rest of the animation we're going to be doing. Now, one thing we want to do is make our character lean forward, so they are just leaning into the run. And we can grab that torso bone here. And if we press the end panel here, see that we don't have any keyframes on the rotation, which is great. We don't need those. We'll grab the rotate here, and we'll see that we want to rotate forward, which is the red axis, which is our x axis. So switching to side view here, pressing Control three, we will make our character just lean forward by adding a little bit of rotation there. How much you want to add depends on you. I'm going to set mine to about 15 degrees. And now when we play, it looks like our character is leaning forward into their run. Next, let's work on the arms. I'm actually going to turn this back into a three D viewport. Going to switch to the top view by pressing seven so that I can see my arms. Now I'm going to grab a hand control here. And if we're mimking the kind of anime style run that I have in the opening, we're going to want these arms to appear behind our character. But we want to save ourselves some animation time. So what I'm going to do is come here to the first frame. I'm going to grab both these hands. And you'll see that based on the movement we've done, we're already having some key frames on the hands that we don't need down here, so we can go ahead, grab these and just delete. And now we only have key frames for both these hands on the first frame. And what we're going to do is come over here. And we're going to turn on the mirror across the x axis. So if we come over here to the tool panel on your end panel and click Pose Options, and we do x axis mirror, and we click that. Now, if I just select one hand here in the front, I move it, you see that it mirrors everything over the x axis, which is the red axis here. So now we can go ahead and insert keyframes on just one hand and it'll insert on both for both of us. With this, it should be a lot easier to insert keyframes on our hands. Now let's go to the last frame, with your hand grabbed, press G, and then click, and what that will do is just insert a keyframe there. Now we want to make our hands kind of bob up and down, because right now they're just staying in place. So let's move forward and see where we want to insert that. Here, we can see that if we move forward to about frame five, our characters at the highest. So let's grab our hands there and just move our hands up. And then let's look at when that other frame occurs. We can see that next highest frame occurs there in frame 11, so let's bring our character hands up again. And then we can kind of look at those in between frames of when they're squatted down. So we have one here at three. Bring our hands down, and you can rotate those if you want and look at when they drop down again to right around eight or nine, bring our hands down. And then now when we hit play, we'll see that we're getting some movement on our hands. But when we press play here, you'll see that it doesn't look supernatural. But let's look at a simple trick to fix that by offsetting the animation. So essentially, when it goes down, the arms should lag behind our character. And an easy way to do that is if we come up here to the graph editor with both of our hands selected, we will press A, select all of our keyframes, and I'm just going to press period so that we can see them. And if we hit shift E, make cyclic, Going to add this modifier, that will then make it loop forever. So now we can move all these to the left and right, and they will just loop. With all those selected, we can just move them forward one frame to offset them. So if I hit G one, with all these selected, what it will do is move it forward one frame. If I was a type negative one, it would move it back one frame, and so on. Now when we hit play, we see that the arms are kind of just bouncing behind the body and giving us a little bit more of a natural look. Perfect. Now let's go ahead and do something similar with the head and the ears. Next, let's do the head. So we'll hit Control three there, snap into view with the head. We'll grab that head, we're going to be rotating on the x right here. Now, you can set this to zero to start, and then you may notice you have extra keyframes down here. These just get added anytime you grab the bone since we have the available keying on. So I would just grab anything that's not on the first frame and delete it so we can start fresh there. And We will come down here to seven, which is kind of the midpoint, and we will insert a keyframe on both of those. So let's enter x rotation of negative five. Let's come forward to seven, and we'll enter negative five again. And that'll kind of be our repeating keyframe there. Now we'll come to the middle frame and make the head kind of bounce forward. So let's do five degrees forward. Now, we have these here, and if we hit Shift E, make cyclic, we'll see that it will kind of do a cyclic modifier, and just repeat that for infinity. And if we hit play there, you can see now we're getting a head bounce with our character and how much character that is just adding to the motion overall. Let's do the same thing with the ears. So let's grab the ears, make sure that in the view, tool mode. You still have the x axis mirror on. I'm going to switch to the front view for this one. And again, I'm going to delete all those extra key frames we have at the end. Make sure that you have both ears selected when you do this part. Great. I'm going to delete that. Now I'm going to select just the left ear here. And I'm going to move forward to the seventh frame, and I'm going to hit R and click. And that will insert the same keyframe both of theirs. Now we're going to come here to frame four, and I'm just going to kind of rotate these ears a bit. So it just kind of looks like they're bouncing around. Perfect. Now we will grab these keyframes on both ears. So grab both ears, press A and the graph editor to select everything. Shift E, make cyclic, and now we should get some bouncing ears. We can make those ears look like they're bouncing more by offsetting which will make it appears that the head is bouncing first, and then the ears are kind of bouncing afterwards. So we will press A to select everything, G, two, that will move the key frames forward two frames and make it appears that they're lagging behind by two frames. And you can see now that our ears are bouncing as well, and how much character we're getting in this run. Now, using what we've just learned, I'd like you to do the same thing on some of the other accessories. So if you come over here to the Torso tweak, what I have done, and you can sol this by turning off the other layers so that you only see these here. So if I come here to the torso tweak, you can see that I have added bones to each one of these collars and have also added this bone back here for the sword. What I'd like to see you do is insert keyframes here on the z location of the sword and on the z location of the collar pieces here, and go through all of these and insert some animation and make those bounce around just like we did with the ears in the head, using the same exact methods. You can see what that looks like here in the final animation. Just adding all these little bits that bounce around can add a lot of character to your work. But next, let's look at how you can render out these animations to share your results. 8. Rendering Your Project: Congratulations on making it this far in the course. If you've made it this far, that means you've animated two characters, and you've also learned the basics of a animation walk cycle. Now, next, what I'm going to do is show you how to use the included example file so that you can export your animation and share it. Now, if you've been following along, your character should be center here in the scene. So what you want to make sure is that when you have your character rig selected here in object mode, that your location and rotation are zeroed out. Now, in both example files, the cat adventurer and the pants leg here, you'll see over here in the scene collections that there's a lighting and camera option and an environment option. Those are turned off so that you can focus on animation. But now you can go ahead and turn these on, and you should have a full scene setup. Now, the camera and the environments are set up to match the fact that your character is dead center in the scene and hasn't had its scale altered at all. So keep that in mind. But if I press zero here, I can see that I have a camera view here that I can then render. Now you have two options when rendering. If you are on a higher end computer, then I would recommend rendering cycles. Cycles is a retracing render engine, and it is going to yield a bit more realistic results. You can check your render engine here under the render properties and render engine cycles. Once that is ticked on, I would recommend setting your samples to something around 150, and then turning on Denise with open image Denise and these settings right here. You can click on Ue GPU if you have the GPU. And set your GPU complete here. If you don't know what a GPU means, that means basically, do you have an in video graphics card? Once you've done that, you can come over here to the output properties. You can choose the location of your export here, and then you can choose to export it as a PNG sequence or an MP four. By default, it'll be set up to a PNG sequence, but you can come to P&G, change it to FF MPEg video, come down to encoding, and change the container. From this to Peg four. And when you do that, you'll export yourself an MP four. After that, you can just come up to render and click Render Animation, and then it will go through frame by frame and render your animation so that you can share it online. I mentioned that if you have a faster computer, you should use cycles. However, I will also have these scenes setup for EV, as well. And EV is a simpler render engine, similar to a video game render engine. However, it will render much faster. I will have all these settings set up for you. So the only thing you'll need to do is change the output location in the format that you want to render in. Now, this last setting is only specific to the pants character. So you may notice that I've had these googly eyes here, the button, and the stitches to kind of make it look like a character. Now, if you don't want to do this last step because it feels too complicated for you, I've left the eyes separate from the pants, so you can just grab those eyes delete those if you want to skip this step. However, the eyes, which are Googly eyes, use a rigid body simulation to kind of get that effect of the eye pieces bouncing around. Now, what you want to do before you render, if you want to leave these eyes in your scene is come over here to your scene properties, come down to rigid body, and you'll want to bake all dynamics. What that's going to do is just bake the animation of these eyes bouncing around so that you can render with less issues. Now, if you go ahead and make adjustments to your character, you might notice that it breaks, go ahead and delete all bakes there. 9. Outro and Resources: Congratulations. You finished the course and thank you for joining as we walk you through your first walk cycle in Blender three D. You should definitely be proud of yourself because you've learned a lot along the way. Hopefully you've gained some valuable skills from this course that will help you on either your professional journey or just diving deeper into your hobby. Make sure to keep practicing and exploring new techniques. Don't forget to check out the recommended courses and resources below to continue your growth as a three DD artist. Also, make sure to share your projects and stay connected with the community as well. I'm excited to see what you pose.