Advanced Animation (Project 1_Walk Cycle)
23/4/2025-23/7/2025
Ruthlene Chua Zhen Si 0365222
Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
- Instruction
- Lectures
- Class Summary
- Task
- Walk Cycle (Vanilla & Attitude)
- JUMPLINK TO:
- Feedbacks
- Reflections
INSTRUCTION
Task
For this assignment, we explored simple character animation by creating a walking pose. First, we searched for reference images and videos of both original and pose-based walks, then recreated the walking pose. By observing the references, we identified the key extreme poses such as contact, down, pass, and up.
We were then instructed to animate two types of walk cycles: the vanilla walk and the attitude walk. A vanilla walk cycle is a natural and standard walk where the character moves normally without any added emotion or style. In comparison, the attitude walk adds personality and emotion to the movement, making the character more expressive. This helped me understand how walk cycles can reflect both basic motion and character traits.
To complete the exercise, we first explored and understood the rig, then gathered image and video references for both types of walks. After spotting the key extreme poses, we set up the project with an image size of 1280 x 720 at 24 frames per second. Finally, we animated the vanilla walk in Blender with natural timing of two steps per second, applying pose-to-pose animation for the main actions and straight-ahead animation for flexibility.
This exercise wasn’t very difficult, but it required a lot of patience. The recorded lectures from the teacher were really helpful whenever I fell behind. The main challenge was adjusting the joint rotations, since I still need more time to get familiar with the basics. Overall, it wasn’t a big problem—at the start I mainly followed the teacher’s tutorial to complete the keyframes.
The next step was adjusting the Graph Editor to make the animation smoother and less stiff. Some unnecessary keyframes in the graph could be deleted to clean up the motion, which helps the animation look more fluid and polished overall.
This part was mainly about editing the Graph Editor. Every bend of the body had to be checked carefully to make sure the movement looked natural and smooth.
Looks like the final line work turned out quite nice, haha.
Here's the final outcome:
As for the next assignment, which is the attitude walk, I decided to go with an angry walk. I felt that the rhythm of an angry walk is quite different from a normal one, almost as if the steps fall faster, so I wanted to challenge myself with it (haha).
But honestly, I wasn’t really sure how an angry attitude walk should look. So, I went online and found a cartoon-style walk cycle, then took some parts from it as reference to create my own version.
Similar to the previous walk cycle, but this time it was harder to catch the walking rhythm of an angry person. I think the grumpy effect is there a little, but not strong enough, so it still needs improvement.
I also spent some time working on the angry facial expression. Since the default expression set didn’t fully match what I wanted, I made some small adjustments myself, which was actually quite fun. Another detail I focused on was the posture—angry people usually have a slightly bent back, so I tweaked that part as well.
As usual, graph editing time ~
The entire graph editor of the entire body parts (quite nice o0o)
Final Outcome:
Feedbacks
I noticed the movement of the right hand seems a bit stiff. You can check the Graph Editor in Blender, specifically the F-Curves, and make some adjustments to smooth it out. Also, although the action stops at frame 24, to make the loop feel more natural you can extend it to frame 25 so the cycle flows better.
Reflection
This assignment gave me a clear understanding of how walk cycles work, from identifying the key poses to refining them through the Graph Editor. The vanilla walk was straightforward, but it taught me patience and the importance of smooth joint rotations. Moving on to the attitude walk, I challenged myself with an angry walk. It was tricky to capture the rhythm and grumpy mood, but experimenting with posture, facial tweaks, and bent-back adjustments made the process enjoyable.
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