We are taking the next step this week and will be working on breaking down a walk cycle and its weight distribution.
For further study, I read and watched a video provided by George.
A walk cycle is really just the illusion of a controlled fall repeated endlessly, and no one explains that better than Richard Williams in The Animator’s Survival Kit. Your character leans forward, loses balance, and then the lead leg races in to catch the weight before the whole process starts again. That subtle tilt of the torso, the slight dip of the head, and the counter-rotation of the shoulders are what convince the viewer that gravity exists in your world. Once you internalise this idea, every stride you draw will feel grounded instead of floaty.
The fastest way to get there is to build from four key poses: Contact, Down, Passing, and Up. Alan Becker’s video “Animating Walk Cycles ” shows how Contact sets the feet, Down drops the hips to store weight, Passing shifts that weight over the supporting leg, and Up lifts the body just enough to free the other foot for the following fall. Layering these beats on your timeline automatically produces the vertical bounce our eyes expect, and it keeps the silhouette readable from any camera angle. From there, you can tweak spacing and timing to reveal personality: linger longer on Contact and you get a tired trudge; compress the Up/Down distance and you get a bouncy cartoon sneak.
Arms swing opposite the legs, but don’t treat them as an afterthought. A heavier, slower arm pass adds age or sadness, while snappy, wide swings sell excitement. Keep the cycle in place and slide the background instead; it’s easier to revise one offset layer than to re-key an entire stride. Finally, grid your mass line so every Down pose hits the same low mark—consistency here is what lets you shuffle timing later without breaking the illusion of weight.
For this week’s assignment, I first recorded myself taking a step to use as a reference:
After I did some planning, I drew it. First, I sketched only the leg movement without realising I hadn’t included the hip movement, so it came out stiff.
(incluir primer planning)
I then created another plan with the weight shift from the hips:
After all the planning I did, I went to Maya to animate it. This is the outcome:
In addition to the weight shift, we also rigged a new pose from one of our sketches.
