A tutorial on walk cycles

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Since a few people requested this I decided to go ahead and write my first tutorial!

A tutorial on walk cycles

Hopefully I made everything clear, if anyone has any feedback on it I’d appreciate it.

Note the tutorial does assume some basic understanding of Blender and the armature system.

Enjoy :wink:

2

That is one very smooth natural walk cycle. I bookmarked your tutorial for much needed reference. Great work.

3

Thanks for the tutorial :slight_smile:

4

Very nice tut.

Am I wrong or you elected to use Forward Kinematics rather than Inverse?

Stefano

5

I was going to build some character anim this week, including walk cycles. This is a great reference. Thanks!

6

Thanks for a great tute.

7

Thanks for your comments everyone :slight_smile:

I’ve made a few small updates to the tutorial just to clarify a couple of points.

I did use forward kinematics, but it isn’t essential to do so. The principles of walk cycles are the same either way. What’s important are the positions of the bones in the various keyframes.

I’m still learning the different aspects of animation in Blender. Creating a walk cycle for part of the game I’m working on forced me to do some research, and I learned a lot from it. So I thought I’d write this tutorial to share my findings with you all. Hope it proves useful :wink:

8

Wow this tutorial is really good
the method lays a foundation down to achieve more than just walk cycles
:slight_smile:

9

found this one with the search function. great reference.

10

Just glanced thru it, since I don’t have time to read it right now. But it looks great. Will have to read it little later.

11

good my walk cycle looks like he is kicking things

12

In your tutorial you are not taking advantage of a very cool feature in pose mode: the mirrored pose copy-paste. To be able to use it you should use a naming convention, appending a ‘.L’ or ‘.R’ suffix to the paired bones (Hand.L, etc). You can then copy the mirrored pose from the limbs on one side of the body to the limbs on the other side.

When creating the armature, the roll angle of each bone has to be set using Cntrl-N for this to work correctly.

All this should be done before animating the armature.

Where I learnt this:
http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI/x6773.html