Preparing the walk cycle scene
Imagine walking alone down a straight, level hallway. With nothing to trip over or distract you, your walking movement will tend to repeat itself – left foot, right foot, left, right, left, right – until you reach your destination. It matters little whether the hallway is several meters or a mile long; your movement at a given segment of time would look like any other segment. For that matter, this would also be true of marching, jogging, running, skipping – any movement on two legs that repeats itself.
In the animation world, this sort of thing is called a walk cycle – a periodic walking animation that can repeat ad infinitum for as long as the animator needs. More than just a technical exercise, a walk cycle is a valuable asset that can be reused in any scene in which a character walks in a straight line.
To set up our scene for such an animation, we’ll start by labeling some frames in the Timeline. Then we&...
