Here is my Wolf Walk Cycle animation. Still leaves a lot to be desired, but i found that animating 4 legged characters is much harder than i thought. Now will delve into the run cycle and then into the whole animation with a story.
If you are having some difficulty, perhaps this link could help.
Thanks for the references. Maybe will use for the run cycle. Yes, as you can see I do have a problem, but on my opinion , problem not as much with the legs ( though still want to get the right feeling of the wolfs weight) as with the hips and lower and upper points of the wolfs body. Also there are no front and back references so it’s quite confusing. The problem with all reference images are that they don’t take into account the length of bones of each individual characters. For walk I was using this reference - https://goo.gl/images/GWUCf1. So since the distance beetween shoulder joint, elbow joint and wrist joint are different ( almost all references are cartoonish and not anatomically correct), and when you trying to completely copy the reference you end up with some funky movements. In my case I had effect when the front legs where walking but back legs where sort of running, so I had to significantly divert from following that reference image in order to fix that problem
Take a look at the link I sent again and look at the top right corner. The top view shows how the body shifts from left to right. It’s about as close as you can get for the front and back reference.
Hey Silverland, great animation, am I reading right that you made the rig? Really cool. The timing is feeling right, and the motion is a little poppy but its on its way. I think if you fix some of the key poses in the feet its going to look awesome. Right now the front half feels like its handling all the locomotion and its literally pulling its body forward. The best bit of advice I ever got about a quad walk was to think of the back half as the engine. Those back legs are pushing the body along and the front legs are only there to steer him around. I hope that made sense. So to apply that to your walk, I would offset the front paw’s cycle by about 12 frames so that when one of the back paws land, the front one on the same side is already in a passing position. (refer to frame “1” on XerShadow’s reference he sent you) from there its polishing the hips as you said, make sure they’re functioning just like they would for a human walk for each the front half and back half. Treat it that way and its very cool how those nice “U” shapes you see from the top view just kind of happen. Great stuff man, really looking forward to seeing the run cycle next!
Thank you for such a comprehensive comment and advise… I will try and see. Also, some guys on another forum gave me this awesome link for an unknown tutorial about quadrups run, walk and trot cycle. So I will use it as well. http://www.iamag.co/features/video-tutorial-quadruped-locomotion/ . By the way , after the run cycle, I am planning to do complicated animation where this wolf will be chasing a hare through the forest and the snow supposed to splash from under their legs while they running + steps on the snow and stuff like that. Crazy idea but want to test myself 
And yes, you right, I made my own rig for this wolf. During walk cycle you cannot see all of rig functionality because the movements are not extreme but I think its quite functional and flexible with facial expressions, drivers, many rotating pivot points on the spine, and inverse kinematic for the head and neck. It’s my first more or less normal rig, because I am still learning rigging, and getting a bit confused sometimes.
Guys I need advise. I desided to make a walk cycle again from scratch and to delete previous. How many keyframes I need for a walk cycle? I was using 30.In the tutorials they always use 24: so 4 for one side, other 4 for flipped pose = 8, and three in betweens, so 8*3 = 24. But on reference images they have often 5 keyframes for one side, so it will be 30. The one that Xero Shadow gave me also has 30 keyframes. So I am confused what is better 24 or 30?
Personally I like the 30frame cycle you have. It seems like a good pace for a wolf. The important part from your reference is going to be the key poses you place in. The timing of those poses is ultimately up to you, and can change depending on the character. I think when just starting out, its easier to wrap your head around a cycle when your keys are evenly spaced round 24 or 30 frames and that’s the reason your seeing it that way. I would start with 30, and block out the key poses in Constant interpolation. When finished play it back; if it feels too slow, use the dope sheet to spread your poses across 24 frames and see what happens.
Thanks. Will try that
What do you think guys? Is it safe to press render button again?
If you still see some choppiness, please tell me at what second and i will try to fix it. Thanks again. I was trying to follow that reference images as best as i can. I changed my rig, weight painting, made my wolf taller, improved the fur btw
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Way better than before. Starting to look natural.
Thanks, this time it was harder. By the way i also changed a lot in wolf appearance and also added my aurora to this walk cycle. One of the frames looks like this so far
It’s looking good. Maybe the the hips are swinging from side to side a little too much so you might want to dial that back a bit.
Call it done for now. Trot and run cycles are almost ready as well. Soon will get into the combining different actions together and then will start to model a rabbit for my wolf to chase
I have two questions guys:
1 - How to get rid of color banding. I am using dithering of 2.0 and 16 bit and its still there
2 - Why stationary stars are moving like a noise. I didnt animate them.
Not too much important this minor things but still its better to get rid this issues.