Animating a Walk Cycle

Animating a convincing walk is one of the most difficult things to achieve, and this is what determined me to make this tutorial. Hopefully this tutorial will help you understand some animation tips and theoretical concepts when animating a walk cycle. I will break the rules and tell you that animating walks is not the hardest thing in the world, you just need to know how to do it right. There is no need to learn how to make various types of walks (i.e. fast, slow, jumpy, sad, etc.), but you need to know some basic steps. All the steps are going to be applied to all walk types; the rest is just tweaking and flavoring.

Basically, animating a walk cycle requires producing two extreme key positions, and twining them in a logical way. As all the components of your character (such as head, arms, body, legs) seem to move independently, and that’s why it appears so impossible to nail the action in a character walk. However, when breaking down the action into sections, the task becomes so far much simple.

A much easier way to reproduce a walk effect is to use a walk cycle. In a walk cycle, the character’s walk is repeated on the spot. However, even though a walk cycle is slightly more demanding from a technical point of view, it saves you a lot of time.