Ok. Here's my first paper dealing with beginner techniques. On this one, I'll try to explain one of the most basic character animation exercises... the walk cycle. I'm not going to explain how to breathe life into a walk cycle... that's something you should discover on your own... I'm merely going to explain how I approach the task, workflow-wise. So, let's take a look at it.

The first thing you should do is pose your character. You can start the walk from a 'stand' position (both feet on the ground, one in front of the other), or from a half-step position (one foot on the air). However you choose to begin, it's your choice, depending on the shot to be animated, and how things are framed, the previous sequence, etc.

The first thing I usually animate is the COM node. I will not touch anything else until I get the timing and pace for the COM right. I'll usually create a list controller for the Z position track, and assign a waveform controller to the second controller for the track. This will give me that natural 'bounce' for the track (in the case of a cartoony character). You may want to do this by hand. If you use the controller, be sure to assign a multiplier curve to it, so you can keyframe when you want to turn the bounce off or back on. Ok. Please, DO NOT proceed to animate anything else until you get the COM's motion and timing right. If you do not do this and animate, say, the feet, and then you find out your COM is going too fast or too slow, after adjusting it you'll find the feet are off-sync with the COM and you'll have to adjust these too... time consuming.

Once you feel the COM node moves correctly, you may proceed with the rest of the character. I'll usually continue with the feet. What I'll do is slide the feet over the ground so that they just position themselves at the right time in the right point in space. The character will look very unatural and strange... don't worry at this point. Just get those feet sliding along, making sure they stand still at the proper times by using lock keys on their position tracks (lock keys can be created by copying the previous keyframe forward in time and setting their out/in interpolation methinds to linear... or setting tangency to 0, which is the same). So, your character will look like a strange rigid robot sliding its feet.

To continue refining the feet movement, I'll next animate the foot roll. This is easy, just see where the feet land or leave the ground. When the feet are leaving the ground, you should animate the foot roll so that the foot rolls forwars. When the foot is about to land, you should animate the foot roll backards so that the character lands on its heel, and when the character lands, animate the foot roll forward so that the foot touches the ground completely a few frames after landing. I hope this is clear enough.

Let's now take the sliding look away. Go back to the start of your walk, and scrub the time slider to the points where each foot is mid-way through a step. Once you get there, just animate the foot upwards a bit, so that it actually takes off the ground. Do this for each step for each foot.

Once you're done (you might have to work a little on sliding a few keyframes back/forth), you'll see that your character now has a much natural walk. However, it is completely still from the waist up. Let's now work on that. What I'll do is scrub the time slider and animate the master spine rotator object bending the spine forward a few frames AFTER one of the feet has touched the ground. This motion should always be a bit offset from the main animation, since it belongs to the character's secondary animation. Do the same for the spine bending backwards... do it a few frames after the foot took off from the ground. This movement can be as exaggerated or subtle as you want (it, of course, depends on the personality of the character and the type of walk you're animating). Once you've done this for the whole cycle, go back and animate the master rotator the same way, but to force the spine to go sideways. This means rocking the character left and right with each step (AFTER each step, I mean). This will give the character this toony rocking motion... again, be your own judge on how strong this motion should be.

Once the spine is done, I animate the head. Why? Because it seems natural to me to follow this progression, since secondary motion propagates upwards through our body. This way, I get a very natural feel for the walk. I animate the head pretty much like I animated the spine, except that the head's movement should be offset from the spine, just like the spine's movement was offste from the COM.

Once you're done, it's time to move those arms. This should be pretty straightforward... just look at yourself walk to see where each arm is at any point in time. Remember to animate the arms also a bt offset from the spine... this will give the character that natural swinging motion.

Ok. You could pretty much say you're done with the bulk of the walk. It's time to do the hard part... tweaking. Play back your animation. How does it look? I'll usually start adding some motion to the hips rotator. Check how secondary motion ripples through the character's body. I can't stress enough how important secondary motion is (and I'm not talking about flabby bellies and flappy ears yet). Secondary motion is the most important part in animating a character.

Secondary motion is where most beginning animators fail. They'll usually animate everything in-sync, which results in a veri rigid and unatural movement. We never move like a single synchronized entity... if you can, do a little research on human kinematics, and watch as many saturday morning cartoons as you can (or your family allows). This will give you a clear idea on how characters of different types move, and hopefully show you how you can make yours alive. Animate on!!

©Sergio Muciño. maxTD 2000.