A walk cycle is the motion in which someone walks. In animation, it's a loop of how someone would move from one place to another. Walk cycles can have a lot of personality, for example, a bright, bubbly character might have a springy, over exaggerated walk, and a tired or lazy character might walk hunched over or shuffle.
I didn't do anything like this because animation isn't my strong point, but I had fun with animating what I did, and I really improved my skills.
I started off by loading up the file provided to us, which is of a model called 'Bonnie' who has already been rigged up to animate with. I had a few problems using the rig at first, but when I figured out how to control it, things became a lot easier.
I found a simple walk cycle off the internet and inserted it in to work from. It was annoying to size it up and down until it fit the model. Because the reference image is to a realistic scale, and the model isn't I had a few problems later on getting it to follow the movement exactly.
I ended up moving the reference down and making it transparent so I could see the whole rig. At first, I wasn't sure how to animate it, as all the control were locked. At first I tried unlocking them all individually, but nothing seemed to work. It was a while later (when I had decided to go with the other animation method) that I discovered how to unlock everything.
However, I was already well on my way to finishing the animation, so I stuck with how I was doing it.
I ran into a problem very early on. As I started animating, I realised that I was animating the walk cycle the wrong way around, and it would be a backwards walking cycle instead. I deleted all the frames I'd created and started again, this time making sure to follow the reference closer this time.
Once I'd run through the entire cycle, I realised it was only half a walk cycle I'd completed. I upped the frames and worked from the cycle again, only this time flipping all the legs back to front to make sure it worked. After I finished I had a look at it, and I realised something wasn't right. Because I had only been doing a basic version of the walk cycle (saving the details for later), there was no rise and fall to the walk.
The walk looked too robotic, so I tried to fix it with a rise and fall, but it only made the animation clunkier. I decided to scrap everything and start again. This time, however, I included all the details in the legs to make sure everything was perfect.
I rotated the feet to give the walk the right angles, and everything looked better than the previous times I'd done it. After going through the walk cycle, I realised the arms were too far out and still looked heavily robotic. I pushed the arms inwards and rotated the hands towards the body when they were in front of the model, and away when they were behind.
This brought the whole animation together, and I'm proud of how it turned out. I think I could've done better with the rig, as it took me a long time to figure out what to do, and how to do it. I also could've done better with adding a personality to the walk. It wasn't high on my priorities, but if I were to do a walk cycle animation again I would try and give the model more personality.
This is the finished walk cycle: