The beginning of every artists’ journey into character animation, The walk cycles. Oh how we loved learning about making walk cycles for the second and third weeks of our first semester. I in particular was actually looking forward to this sort of lecture as I have found myself wanting to make walk cycles for my characters a lot before in the past, especially when I saw the “Soldier, Poet, King” animation memes on YouTube! It’s just something I’ve been wanting to learn how to do. So when we started spending the classes learning about the basic walk cycles first such as from the animation survival book or the book Cartoon Animation (Which I had in the house from a previous secondary school teacher).
When it came for us to start working on our own walk cycles using our own characters I chose to first experiment with creating a cycle for my character from the other module, Redacted.
(Meant to be GIF files…)
Safe to say it took a few go’s at his walk cycle to get it to a place where I was happy enough with the feel of it and it being my walk with a personality example due to his limp he walks with due to being a declawed cat, the arms were also a bit of a pain to work out since I knew I didn’t want him to move them much if at ALL since, come on he’s meant to be a creepy guy!
As for the default walk cycle, I had been trying to do a simple walk cycle to get used to the movement of the legs with my character Dickie in a different software just on my phone since I had been testing out walk cycles and how I could translate the movements of the default walk from “Cartoon Animation” by Preston Blair as I had this book in the house before I started my Uni course.
Due to my characters all mainly being anthropomorphic animals who have digitigrade legs I also took a lot of time watching MANY animation memes on YouTube of similar characters who are walking too, some of which include:
“Soldier, Poet, King Animation Meme” by SEGAmastergirl / Tennelle Flowers / Ranciel / LupisVulpes (All YouTube usernames)
“Floor is Lava Meme” by PaintedSerenity / Tennelle Flowers / XcaosX / Stariaat (Again all YouTube usernames)
While the Floor is lava is mainly a run cycle it was mainly to see how digitigrade legs would move, same reason for why most of the references are feral/4-legged creatures moving. Then taking the knowledge I gained from that I started on making my walk cycle for Dickie which through NO fault of his own… got left armless for many many weeks until I could figure out how I wanted to make his arms move with him…
After all of this I ended up with this handsome lad right here!
Yea… probably ain’t the BEST walk cycle in the world.. but! its alive? I will likely continue to experiment with making walk cycles for a plethora of my characters so that I can get the hang of it better and learn how to make them feel even more expressive with the personality of my characters in mind, something I will most likely add to my blogs or throw up onto a word document to keep safe for later work etc, Who Knows what my mind will lead me to do now that I have this knowledge!
After some thinking I also moved Dickie over into ToonBoom to be my official default walk cycle and while yes he meets the criteria of being a default walk cycle, he also somewhat looks like he is in a rush which in my opinion is quite on brand for his character since he is more of the upbeat and cheery character. I was worried at first about moving Dickie over to ToonBoom as I wasn’t entirely sure that his walk cycle would be easy to do or time consuming which would cause huge problems for me in the coming weeks as I would be running out of time for my submission but with the perseverance of a determined animator I got through this process quite quickly if I’m honest and I believe while it isn’t the best compared to other artists, for a basic looking walk cycle that I had made… it wasn’t half bad?
Both ToonBoom walk cycles can be seen below
Being honest about my Redacted walk cycle, I didn’t have a reference for his movements, I got the groundwork of his body down and altered the movement of it slightly once advised by the lecturer to give it more weight when it reaches it’s down pose on the right leg since I was trying to convey that he was limping on his left leg as it is his sore one which he isn’t putting weight onto. The arms is where I ran into trouble with this as I knew I didn’t want them to move TOO much to add to that creepy feel but also it was extremely hard to find references for this arm movement however I somewhat found a reference in the Plants Vs Zombies mummy zombie walk from PVZ II.