Walk Cycles

A walk cycle is an animation where a character appears to walk or run in place, similar to moving on a treadmill. Walk cycles are a staple in both film and video games, as the character can be animated running in place and then moved later. This technique provides filmmakers with flexibility in how the animation is utilized.

Most "normal" walk cycles should last anywhere around 1-3 seconds before they loop. If your character is sprinting the cycle will be shorter, and if they are walking slowly or are in slow-motion, then the loop will be longer. For instance if you decide to make a slow-motion animation, the loop could be up to around 4-8 seconds long.

Before we get started, let's look at how this skipping animation uses layers to create different levels of movement.

Don't forget to carefully consider how the feet are positioned in each of the 5 drawings

Tip #1: Very subtle changes that you make to the animation will make BIG differences.  Changes in the way a character twists their shoulders or positioning their head can make the difference between a character presenting as happy, sad, confident, or angry.

Tip #2: When keyframing your  Bipedal characters, consider starting with animating your characters legs, torso and head on one layer. Then add your arms as a second layer so that you can adjust the timing of the arm movements independently.

Add cartoonish confidence to your character by using the double bounce.  At it's core, the double bounce is a pretty simple concept.  A normal walk cycle has one bounce per step, and the double bounce has two per step. All you need to do is on your Passing Position drawing,  bring your character down, rather than up. 

Here are some great breakdowns on how to accomplish a cartoonish sneak walk.  Three sneaks are shown below. 

There are many different ways to approach a running biped character. When deciding how you want to approach a Run Cycle, first consider do you want to make something realistic, exaggerated realistic, or cartoonish. For either realistic or exaggerated realism, consider the Muybridge reference or video reference. For cartoonish run cycles see the examples below. These examples show some of the techniques we saw in Tom & Jerry.

Here's an excellent video on how to animate a horse

Here is a class demo project I have made of a dog walking. This loop is animated in "Twos" which means that each drawing lasts for two frames. 

This cycle is 40 frames (1.6 seconds) So that means that I needed to create 20 drawings in order to make this animation.

Below is a snapshot of my timeline. I separated my character into layers and used different colors so that I could stagger the timing between the front legs, rear legs, tail, and head (Don't feel like you have to separate things as much as I did here. Some people prefer to do more on just one or two layers). 

Tip to Avoid Animating in ONES when animating with Multiple Layers:

When I initially keyframed my animation, I timed everything in eights. 

As I added in-betweens, I moved to fours, and finally to twos. By consistently using even numbers, even when staggering timings across layers, I ensured that I never had to switch to animating in ones.

(You could hypothetically do the same thing by starting on Twelves, then inbetweening on Sixes, and finally Threes)