Before starting my walk cycle, I began looking at different kinds of walks.

The walk at 1:20 was one I had spotted and thought looked fun to animate.  With this in mind, I began looking into finding more references of this skip-like walk cycle.

I really liked this one as it had a lot of cartoonish exaggeration to really show the happiness of the character.  They have also shown a breakdown of their process on their artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OkRvw

However, I settled on animating the complete opposite emotion!

Once I saw the first video, I was very inspired to do a more toned down, slow and sad looking walk.  I really love this walk cycle and I’d like to create something similar to it.

I began by posing the character in the correct position on the first frame.  This is something I spent some time perfecting as it would carry through the whole animation.  Originally, I had the back hunched over far more and the arms hanging loosely, however I thought this would make things harder when it came to animating the arms so I opted for a slightly more realistic back arch.  I’m very glad I made this decision as I think it looks really well and as I am unfamiliar with animating arms, it won’t be too overwhelming as a starting point.  To further convey the feeling of sadness/hopelessness, I made the head hang looking at the ground.

I decided to go with a pose to pose approach as it would allow me to keep everything more consistently placed.  I blocked out the contact and passing poses for the legs first, not worrying about timing or any other limb for the moment.

I went back over each pose to make sure the feet weren’t either going into the floor or hovering above the floor where they shouldn’t be.  Going by my reference, I wanted to have the tip of the foot trail on the ground slightly – I think this works very well to get across more negative emotion.

 

This is the very rough starting blockout.  Without stepped preview enabled, the feet went through the ground.

 

I fixed this problem with the feet sinking into the ground and then worked on blocking out the arms.  Working on the torso, I animated the up and down motion with each step the character took – Making him taller on passing poses and gradually shorter as he reached the contact poses.  Similar to the legs, I keyed three main positions for the movement of the arms.

 

This shows me blocking out the movement of the forearms.  I wanted them to move separately from the upper arm to make it look more authentic.  Once again, I used dope sheet to space the keyframes out to make the walk slower.  This made the animation look far better and I feel gets the emotion across better.

 

This is the same movement with minor timing adjustment to the forearms with stepped preview enabled.  I think I got the loose/unenthusiastic look right.  Hoping to add some sway to the hips, I moved them slightly depending on which foot was on the ground, using myself as reference to make sure I was getting the correct side and position.  However, when I watched this through it looked very odd so I went back to the previous save I had made before adding that.

 

When I disabled stepped preview and watched the cycle through, I spotted a problem with the left foot.  It was tilting upwards and coming back down to meet the floor when it shouldn’t be.

To fix this problem, I used the graph editor to pinpoint the keyframes causing the problem and fixed the curve on the graph which had been out of place.  As I was already fixing this problem, I went through making minor tweaks to the leg, arm and torso movements to make the motion look more fluid.

 

This was the result after those changes were made.  I was very happy with the result, but I felt like it looked a little too simple.  The head remained in the same position for the entirety of the cycle except moving in time with each step.  I thought it would look more interesting if I were to animate the character looking up as if to see how far they have left to walk, seeing that there is seemingly no end, and looking back down again in disappointment.

 

I made the the character lift their head up, pause for a second – long enough to be able to tell that they are looking at something/for something and then back down again with a slight bounce to try to show that their limbs feel heavy/they are fed up.  I made sure the head didn’t move in time with the arms or legs as then it wouldn’t have looked as realistic.  It took me some time to get the timing right, but looking at it with everything together, I’m very proud of the result.

However looking back on it now, I would change the timing of the foot dragging along the ground, making it more exaggerative to further emphasise it as I feel it’s easy to miss that detail.  Other than that I’m very happy with the walk cycle.