For this assignment, we were asked to make two animations with the “Monty” rig.

One animation had to involve the whole body moving, and one had to give the character a personality.

For my first animation, I decided to do a walk cycle. I chose this as walk cycles are one of the most important things to master in animation, and so I want to practice. I’ve never animated a walk cycle from scratch, so I thought this challenge would be a useful one.

To start with, I looked up some different walk cycles online for inspiration and reference.

I used a few video references to see what the overall motion should look like. Of course walking is a very basic action that I see every day, but it’s important to pay attention to the details in the movement and not make it up since I’m not experienced.

I also used keyframe illustrations from other animators as reference, for example this one by “the flying animator” . These illustrations show the keyframes in a walk cycle one after the other in a line, giving a good idea of how the animation should be done.

Once I had all my references together, I traced over some of them to get a feel for how they worked. I then drew my own walk cycle key frames based on what I’d learned.

Using these keyframes I created a rough animatic, then added more in-betweens until I had a rough walk cycle I could use as reference for my 3D animation. I’d be using the still image above as my imported reference in Maya, but I’d be tabbing out to watch my rough animation every now and then to see how my 3D animation matched up.

Opening Maya, I created an image plane and applied my sketch to it.

I positioned Monty to match up with the pose, then hit S to create a keyframe. I then moved the image plane and moved along the timeline and repeated this process. After watching through this keyframed animation, I began to add more details.

Monty’s legs were moving, but his body looked very stiff and static. I added a little sway to his walk so his body would have more weight to it. He leans towards the leg that’s touching the ground, this is more realistic as it changes his centre of gravity. To fit with Monty’s cartoonish appearance, I did a little squash and stretch too. His torso squishes down a little when his foot makes contact with the ground, reinforcing that his body has weight while also giving him a more “bouncy” look.

I adjusted the angle of his feet in each keyframe so they lifted off the ground at a natural angle, rather than moving straight up and down like a robot.

I cleaned up the timing and adjusted the position of his feet at some points to avoid clipping. I animated one step for each foot, then made the animation loop back around to the first frame and repeated it a few times.

I showed my classmates for feedback, and sped up the animation a little using the dope sheet since they told me it was a bit slow.

Once I was happy with the animation and made any additional tweaks, I hid the controls using alt+1 and made a playblast.