Walk animation tutorial

Walking character is surly one of the hardest things to animate.
In this short tutorial I would like to show you that it doesn’t have to be that hard:)
The tutorial is aimed for Flash, but you can get the idea for any other animation authoring program.

Meet Jo&Mo.

Those two nice criminals will do their time helping you understand the way the walking is done in animation.
There are several ways how to animate a walking person - I’ll try to cover them all.
Let’s start with ways that are very easy to create, yet provide good result.

no 1 - the Ministry of Silly Walks

Sometimes there’s no time for complex animation, or budget for the cartoon is too short - in such cases animator needs to find a way to create a walking without spending a whole week on it. The good way is to create parody of the walking animation. You’ll feel that the character is walking, but the whole animation could be quite simple.

Example:
Mo is trying to sneak undetected. He makes a lot of small, fast steps - but the trick is that his lengs don’t bent at all.

View Animation

How it’s made:
You need just a torso and two different legs.

Remember to make position of the legs opposite (when left is up, right is down).

no 2 - the Yogi bear style

Remember old H&B cartoon with Yogi the Bear? There was a very nice, and very easy walk animation technique in which legs aren’t moving - just go underneath the torso.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
You just need to copy&paste two legs from previous scene and make quite monstrous “leg cross”

Now you just need to spin it beneath the torso. (this is good for characters with small legs and big torsos)

no 3 - the fake “Hard Way”

You would need some kind of walk cycle reference for it. The best I know is made by Preston Blair and can be found in a book “Animation - How to Draw Animated Cartoons“.
You can also download if from here.
So - when you’ll have the reference, Joe will show you how we can have pretty good effects with minimal effort.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
The tip is to divide the leg into three parts - and create motion tween accordingly to the walk cycle.

The result is nice, but could be better.

no 4 - the real Hard Way

If you would like to try the real thing - here’s how to do the old school frame-by-frame animation.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
No shortcuts here - you need to manually draw each stage of walk (although in flash you just need to animate the legs that way - the rest could be done by using MovieClips for torso, arms and legs). The walk cycle reference would be your biggest friend while doing this.

To position all the frames - you can use flash Onion View mode.

The result depends mainly on how much you focused on drawing (mine could be better - but at the other hand it took me about 10 minutes to draw it).

Hope you liked it:)
If you would like to know more - you can download all the .fla files for learning purposes.