Extended Practice: Walk Cycle Test

For this project, I knew that at some point I would have characters walking, whether that be across the road or through a city, it is going to occur at some point. Therefore I needed to practice animating a walk cycle since I do struggle with this in After Effects. I think my main reason for this is because my characters appear head on, so when they are walking forwards it doesn't look natural and I therefore needed to change the character design so that their body is rotated slightly and one leg (layer) is in front of the other! 

I began by using the references in the 'Animator's Survival Kit' book by Richard Williams which I purchased for first year! This book really helped my with key framing and placements of arms and legs so that the character would look less forced, and more fluid. I rigged my character as always using DUIK in After Effects, making IK handles for the arms and legs. This took an hour or so to do, but after that, I was ready to get testing.

These are two of my influences which I found that I really like. I think that they are so smooth in motion which I now know is so hard to replicate, but they gave me inspiration and were good to look at for reference and understanding different types of walks.

This is the first 24 frames (ready for a loop) that I did. I know that it isn't as fluid and smooth as most walk cycles, but it was my first time so I am not being too harsh on myself. I like that you can tell the character is walking, but I did feel like hit feet don't stay in one place, so this was the next thing I wanted to amend.

To make this a bit more precise, I created a 'solid' which I used as an imitation for a path so that I would have some idea of where his feet could stay grounded. This did help me a lot, but for some reason I couldn't get it to work perfectly, but I kept tweaking and tweaking. The next thing I didn't like was the pace. I felt like the walk was a little bit too slow for my liking which meant that it was obviously not natural and reminded my of my COP3 practical, where sometimes the character's walking was too slow!

I therefore moved some of the key frames along to create a faster walk which I am MUCH more happy with. I also make his feet snap to the floor which is more natural than before! I did notice that his left leg sticks out from behind his back which I just cannot fix for some reason, but I can clear this up in Photoshop later if I decide to use this walk cycle.

Then since because this is a test, I imported the cycle into one of my backgrounds that I had created just to see how it would look. I don't think it looks too bad for a first try. It is a little robotic, but it is a vast improvement from my other walk cycles, so I will continue to practice, but I am happy with the progress!