Steps to success

Walk cycles are one of the staples of 3D character animation. Yet it’s all too easy to end up with bland, robotic movements. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a walk with personality, keyframing and refining a basic movement cycle, then layering secondary animations over the top.

For this, we will use Blender’s NLA Editor (Nonlinear Animation Editor). It works just like a video editor, but using animation ‘strips’ instead of video clips. Each strip represents instances of an action that can be moved, scaled in time or layered on top of other strips. This allows you to create an action that contains one walking cycle, while the strip itself contains as many cycles as are required for your character to walk along the path you have assigned to it. The repetitive nature of the cycling can be offset by using additive action strips to alter the motion, or by adding other strips to layer different actions on top of the walk.

In the tutorial, we’ll be using Proog, the lead character in the world’s first open source animated film, Elephants Dream. First, we’ll keyframe a basic walk cycle and make the action loop properly, then put him on a path and add some actions and layer animations on top of his walk. Finally, we’ll look at some of the extra cloth animation controls the character rig contains. Don’t worry too much about Proog’s coat until the very last step of the tutorial – to look good, it needs some hand tweaking.

The Proog model itself is the genuine rigged character from the movie, and is available under a Creative Commons attribution licence, so it can be used for any project you like.

Most of the tutorial can be completed in Blender 2.41, however some of the advanced steps require Blender 2.42, which is available as a free public download from www.blender.org.

Click here to download the support files (~12MB)

Additional support files are available here