Blending Online

Walk Cycles

This tutorial will cover animating your humanoid characters to have a realistic walk. It won't cover any of the modeling or rigging aspects. However if you download the tutorial model, this is all done for you.

If I find the time I might write a complimentary tutorial in the near future covering how to rig your character.

This tutorial isn't intended to be definitive, but it will hopefully teach you the basics of how to set up a simple but authentic looking walk cycle.

Here's an example of what you should be able to produce after following this through.

Preparation

Move your model and the armature so it's feet rest on one of the axes of the grid. This will act as your reference point for where the floor would be:

Walk cycles can be broken down into at least 4 key steps:

• 2 "Contact Points"
• 2 "Passing Points"

The most important to get right are the contact points. We will assign these 4 key points as keyframes, and simply let Blender interpolate everything inbetween.

Additional note for the tutorial:

Don't move the armatures, only rotate them. If they don't seem to be aligned exactly like those in the pictures it's because the pictures are taken from a completed version.

You should only need to move the armatures to keep the model at ground level. Use the lower back bone to move the whole skeleton. This raising and lowering of the whole body in the walk cycle is a crucial aspect in creating an authentic look.

First make sure you are at frame 1. We'll start by doing the legs and then the rest of the body afterwards.

Contact Point 1 - Right Foot Forward:

Looking at the model from a side view rotate the various leg bones until you have something like this:

Note the contact position with the green line. Rotate the end of the left foot until it's roughly parallel to it.

When you're done select all the leg bones as shown above. Now press i and select rot. This will save the position of the legs in this frame. If you needed to move the model to bring it to the ground level, select the lower back bone and press i again, then select loc.

Now advance to frame 10 using the frame slider. You should notice your pose from frame 1 currently remains the same across all the frames.

Passing Point 1 - Right Foot on the Floor:

Using this picture as a guide, rearrange the leg bones as shown:

Make sure the tip of the left foot is just above the ground. Don't lift the foot too high since most people barely lift their feet off the ground when walking.

When you're done, again select the legs bones as shown, press i and select rot to save the position of the legs. Advance to frame 20. If you move to frame 1 and hit Alt+A you should be able to see the legs move between the two positions you just defined.

Contact Point 2 - Left Foot Forward

This is exactly the same as contact point 1, except the legs are reversed.

Arrange the legs as shown in the contact point 1 picture, but with the left foot forward instead of the right. Afterwards save the position of the legs and advance to frame 30.

Passing Point 2 - Left Foot on the Floor

Again this is the same as passing point 1, but with the legs reversed.

Arrange the legs as shown in the passing point 1 picture, but with the left foot flat on the ground instead of the right one. Save the position of the legs.

Finishing off the Cycle

If you're using the tutorial file you should already have a separate window open with the action editor displayed. If not split the window (Middle Mouse Button on the border of a window) and open the action editor in one of the windows. This helps to speed things up since you don't have to keep flicking between windows.

In the action editor you should see 4 columns of squares spaced evenly. These are the keyframes you've defined for each of the bones. To complete the cycle we want it to loop back to the pose in the first frame.

Select the first column of squares and copy them with shift+D. Place the new squares at frame 40 (frame numbers are displayed along the bottom). You should now have something that looks like this:

Now we have a completed walk cycle for the legs. If you set the end frame of the animation to 39 (in the scene buttons) and press ALT+A again, you should be able to watch the full cycle repeating itself. We stop at frame 39 since frame 40 is identical to frame 1.

Now it's time to animate the rest of the body.

The Arms

Rotate the arm bones and save their positions as shown.

Frame 1 - Left Arm Forward

Although it may not be apparent from this diagram there is a slight difference in the rotation of the elbow joint. This is a subtle difference but adds to the realism.

For the forward arm rotate the elbow clockwise slightly, and for the rear arm rotate the elbow anti-clockwise slightly.

Frame 10 - Arms by the side

Frame 20 - Right Arm Forward

The same as frame 1, but with the arms reversed.

Frame 30 - Arms by the side

Identical to frame 10, you could copy this one from frame 10 using the action editor.

Frame 40 - Left Arm Forward

Copy from frame 1 using the action editor.

The arms should now be swinging during the walk cycle, however they're still straight from the front view...

Move the arms in each of the key frames into positions resembling these:

Both upper arm bones need to be rotated slightly away from the body, and the lower arm bones rotated back towards the body.

Now we have both the legs and arms animated, but there's still the problem of the torso and head not moving. This makes the whole thing look too rigid and unnatural. So time to add the subtle and often overlooked aspects of walk cycles.

The Neck

Here we need to make sure the eyes remain at roughly the same level across the whole walk cycle.

Frames 10 and 30:

Rotate the neck counter-clockwise (downward) a small amount.

The Hips and Shoulders

As we walk along the hips rotate slightly between steps (this effect is more prominent for women). To counter-balance this the shoulders rotate in the opposite direction. Adjust the following from the top down view to create this effect.

Frames 1 and 40:

• Rotate the lower back bone slightly anti-clockwise.
• Rotate the upper back bone slightly clockwise.

You should have something that looks like this:

Frame 20:

• Rotate the lower back bone slightly clockwise.
• Rotate the upper back bone slightly anti-clockwise.

You should have something that looks like this:

Frames 10 and 30:

Leave these frames as they are. It should look something like this:

We're finished! Press ALT+A one more time and you can watch the final result.

If you have any further questions/suggestions or feedback, you can post them in this thread on elYsiun:

http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22613