Animating a walk cycle is an important skill that every animator should know how to do. This is because your animated character will most likely walk from one location to another in your animated film.

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to animate your character’s walk cycle by learning how to implement the four important phases of walk cycle; the down pose, up pose, passing pose, and contact pose.

These key poses will be foundation for animating a walk cycle that looks convincing. In addition to teaching you these four poses, I will also give you some additional tips that I use to improve my walk cycles.

Walk Cycle Animation Requirements

How to Animate a Walk Cycle

You will need to open up your Toon Boom animation program, and title the project the Batman walk cycle. I recommend setting your frame rate at 24 frames per second, and your resolution at 1280 by 720. Go to window. Scroll down and select the timeline button.

You will need to create four layers for this project. So click on the green button in the timeline button, in order to create the layers. The layers that you will create will be named model sheet, rough animation, volume checker, and final animation.

After creating the layers, you will need to import the batman model sheet into this program. You can find it in the walk cycle animation pack that you downloaded.

As soon as you import the model sheet into the program, it will create its own layer. You will then need to right click on the frame, and select convert element to vector. This is will open up a layer called drawing 2. You will then need to copy the frame and paste it in the model sheet layer. Once you have completed this action, you will then need to delete the Batman layer and the drawing 2 layer.

The next step is to trace the Batman model sheet. In order to this you will need to go to the next frame, and turn on the onion skin. After tracing the image, You will need to draw a simplified Batman design by turning his body parts such as the head into simplified shapes; such as squares, circles, triangles, and etc.

This is important to do because it will help you to first focus on the motion of the walk cycle. Once you are happy with your walk cycle, you will then come back and add the details.

Now you almost ready to start animating the walk cycle, but you still need to do a few more things. First draw a horizontal horizon line. Then you will need to draw a line directly above Batman head. This line is necessary because as you are animating the walk cycle, you will notice that Batman’s head will go up and down. The last thing to do is to draw the two walk lines.

The first one will be directly under his right leg, and the other will be directly under his left. These lines will help you to make sure that Batman’s feet are always touching the ground as he is walking.

Now I want you to open the walk cycle animation pack, and pull out the walk reference chart. Now you can see that there are four phases to a walk cycle; an up pose, down pose, contact pose, and passing pose.

I recommend that you create your walk cycle in this order; contact pose, passing pose, down pose, and up pose. You will draw the contact pose by using your simplified Batman design.

You will notice that in the contact pose, Batman’s left hand is moving forward while his right leg is moving forward; and vice versa. This is a simple rule to remember when you are creating your contact poses.

You will then need to draw the passing pose. A rule to remember when you drawing a passing pose is to make sure that the Batman’s head starts to go up, and that his arms will be towards his side.

After the passing pose, you will then need to draw the down pose; which means that the head will go underneath the line. Finally you can draw the up pose. Remember that in the up pose, the head will be at the highest point of the walk cycle. You are now ready to preview your animation.

After first previewing the animation, you will notice that Batman is walking very quickly. In order to slow down this animation, you will need to add some more inbetweens into this animation. Inbetweens are drawings that help you transition from one key frame to the next. For example; in contact pose 1 and down pose 1. You will notice that the head will go down, the right hand will move backward, and that his leg will bend.

When you inbetween, you will need to make sure that the inbetween should show the head starting to go down, and that hand is starting to move backwards, and etc.

If you want to see this concept in action, you will then need to watch the the video at the beginning of this article.The final step is now to clean up the walk cycle animation. Go to the final animation layer, and then turn on the camera view in your Toon Boom program.

You will need to pick a frame that you will use to make sure that the volume in your animation remains consistent. Once you have cleaned up all the frames in your animation, you can then preview the final animation.

Conclusion

Congratulations on completing your animation walk cycle. I hope that you learned how to implement the four parts of the walk cycle into your own walk cycle.

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please share this article with your friends. If you have any questions about the tutorial, you can message me through my contact page.

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