Hello everyone! Welcome back to another Back to Basics tutorial and this time I’m going to show you how to quickly block out a 3/4 animation walk cycle. I find that this is probably one of the most challenging of the walk cycles, but hopefully I’m gonna be able to break it down in very simple terms and you’ll be able to follow along and create your own 3/4 animation walk cycle.
One of the first things I like to try and figure out is “who am I going to animate?”. A few weeks back I drew a couple of characters while I was on a plane going to California and I asked a few people to pick out one for me to animate. They chose this girl and I said, alright I’ll use her to showcase a 3/4 walk cycle. I then like to ask myself, well what is the story? What is the intent that I’m trying to create here? What type of character is she? What is she about? I find it very important to establish a story or motivation to your character because it tends to give it more life.
I find it very important to establish a story or motivation to your character because it tends to give it more life.
The second thing I like to ask is what type of walk does she have? Is she upright, bowed over, heavy or light? Well, she’s a very thin character with a very heavy backpack so I imagined she’d be a little hunched over. What I like to do is put my references on the side to look at. If you don’t know how to do a character walk it’s always good to look at reference. Use your phone to grab video reference of yourself, or a friend and bring it into your software program.
Underneath the girl you can see a checker board platform that she’s walking on. This serves as my ground plane, which is really important when you’re doing a walk cycle because it allows you to figure out where your feet placement is going to be at any given time. It helps you to avoid your character’s feet from slipping and sliding. The vertical blue line you see is a reference to the centre point. The character is going to sway back and forth and I use this line to keep track of that. The top line is the most extreme up that the top of the character’s head is going to reach when she walks.
I hope you guys enjoy this video and if you create your own 3/4 walk cycles then please feel free to share it with us on our social media.
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