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You can draw it with your character standing in place, or with the character moving
across the screen (or page, but this is a flash tutorial, so I'll stick with screen).
Making a walk cycle with character staying in place is a TERRIBLE way to do a walk
cycle. It might look okay when it's on that invisible treadmill, but if you want the
character to move across the screen, either the feet are going to slide on the ground (a
huge pet peeve of mine), or, if you plant the feet, the movement of the character will be
jerky. I worked with a guy who spent a loooong time making his walk cycle "perfect" but
once he got the character off that treadmill, and tried planting the feet, it was a disaster.
And I've certainly been guilty of this mistake myself. Here is my first walk cycle I ever
did in my life (for an introduction to Flash class in college). The design is so ugly that I'm
only showing you the ugly hips and legs.
And here is it moving across the screen, with his feet planted.
Yuck. When you walk you have a consistent speed, but this guy's pace is all over the
place.
The right way to animate a walk cycle is to have the character moving in space. Working
this way, it's easy to keep the feet planted and the speed consistent. But a lot of people
avoid this method because it's hard to keep a character's volumes consistent when it's
moving through space.
But using Flash, I came up with a way to combine the two techniques, and get the best of
both worlds. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to do a super boring, torso and legs only,
Richard Williams walk cycle, but once you get this technique down, you can alter it and
get interesting walks from it as well.
I start by drawing the legs for the first contact pose on the sketch layer. This pose is the
same as the pose for frame 17, so I copy the frame, paste it on frame 17, and line it up
with the torso there.
Now move to frame 9, and sketch out
your contact pose there. Since we've already sketched the first and third contact, it's very
easy to see where the feet go for the second contact. If you find that your second contact
pose is more compact or wide than you like, just go alter the first pose, and that should
fix your problem.
Not the most exciting walk, but you get the idea. Next comes the inbetweens. Let's start
with the the up positions on frames 7 and 15. Make your motion tweens, key out the walk
cycle symbol at frames 7 and 15. Remove the tweens, go inside the walk cycle symbol
and adjust the torso and head to be at their highest position. Then go out on the stage and
sketch your legs.
Okay so now we have the right leg positions for our walk. But chances are, your leg
volumes are inconsistent (mine sure are). To fix this, we do our leg clean ups INSIDE the
walk symbol. This way we use our original sketch as reference for the correct foot
position, but when when we're inside the symbol, our torso isn't moving, so it much
easier to compare the volumes of each leg. This is basically the Flash version of a
traditional animation technique, which was explained really well by the disgustingly
young and talented Matt Williames on his blog Hand Drawn Nomad Zone. (working
professionally for Warner Brothers at age 14????)
So go inside your walk cycle symbol, and create two new layers, one for each leg. Then
at frame one, go inside your symbol and draw your cleaned up leg. Move to frame 3 on
the stage, go inside the symbol and clean up those legs etc etc. I cleaned up one leg at a
time, and worked straight ahead. This helped me keep track of things like the spot where
the leg connects to the hip, and the angle of the thighs and shins. I would also start the
clean drawing with the rough visible, but then turn off the rough to finish the clean
drawing on it's own.
When you're done, you'll have a walk that moves through space, but also one that can be
stationary, if you keep the symbol stationary. Here's my "final". For yours, I would
recommend at least adding arms and a head bounce. And if you're really good, you'll also
redraw the torso and hips so that they twist in space and don't look like the super lame
stiff animation that gives Flash it's bad reputation.
Now you probably want more than two steps out of your cycle. To do this, on the stage,
copy your frames, and on a new layer paste them starting on frame 17. Then using the
edit multiple frames option, move these newly pasted frames so that they start where the
bottom layer stops.
Again, this walk cycle is REALLY boring, I know. But you can do more interesting ones
using the same basic technique. Here's one I did last year.