To make this walk cycle animation I first imported the rig provided to me by my tutor into Adobe After Effects. Before moving any parts of the body I made sure to check that the stopwatch was enabled so a keyframe would be made. The first pose I completed was a contact pose on frame 1, which I then copied onto frame 32 so the animation would be a perfect loop. On frame 16 I also copied the pose again, but swapped the positions of the left and right feet. Next I created the passing poses on frames 8 and 24, with the back foot in the air while the forward foot was flat on the ground. Whilst creating these poses I had to make sure the knees were bent or else the animation would not look like normal human movement.

Once I had created the passing pose and contact poses I moved onto the down and up positions. First I made sure the pelvis would stay in the same position on frames I had made prior so that the up and down position would be noticeable, otherwise it could look off and a bit weird. For the down poses, which go after the contact but before the passing pose (frames 4 and 20) to make a character seem more fluid and weighty, I moved the pelvis down a small amount. The up poses is very similar to the down, but after the passing pose and before contact (frames 12 and 28). I moved the pelvis up a small amount to make it seem like the character is lifting as he steps. If I wanted to exaggerate the animation I could move the pelvis position a lot more to add a cartoony feel.

Next I worked on moving the rest of the character's body to add more life to him. First I opened the torso and head tabs and enabled the stopwatch on their rotations, as that is all I would be altering. I rotated the torso pieces slightly on every Passing Pose to make it seem like it's moving due to momentum. I also moved his head on these frames so that he would always be looking forward instead of his head tilting down. I then moved his arms which I also only needed to rotated. Unlike the torso I moved the upper arms into postion first then the lower arms and hands so they sway with more life and against gravity. 

First I opened the animation mentor file in maya and used the animation workspace so I could see the timeline and adjust the frames. I changed the framerate to be 30FPS so the animation looks smoother than it would on the the default 24FPS. I started this 3D animation by posing the character in the first contact pose. I was then able to copy this pose to the final frame and middle frame but switching the values from the left side to the right and vice versa. 

I then made my passing pose between the contact poses. To make this look like a realistic walk cycle I made sure to make the hips raise as the foot lifts up. Normally I would need to make sure the heel goes flat on the floor but as this is a sneak it makes more sense for him to be walking on his tiptoes as that is the typical way people sneak around. I then copied the frames and pasted it after the middle contact pose and end contact pose but changing the values again.

I then went into the frames in between the contacts and passing just to alter and make things look less abnormal. For example I adjusted the toes as they were going down as they bent too quickly which looked unnatural. I also added a bit of movement to the hair to give it weight while each step is being taken. Once I had all the poses sorted I found that the animation itself was moving too fast so increased the frame count from 30 to 56 frames after messing around with different lengths. I had to save each key frame so I could move them to be on every 7th frame as well.