 Hi there, welcome to step one of the walk cycle tutorial. So the first thing that we need to do in this step is get hold of the rig that we're using. So the rig that I've just shown you in the example is this happy guy and he is called ultimate walker and I will show you where he lives on the internet. So if we go to this website here, so this is cgmeetup.net and I'll put the exact link in the video description but you can see on this page which was written by a Jason so I'm going to assume that Jason is the guy that created these rigs and their ace. You can see he's got loads of different character rigs here that are really good for loading animation. And if scroll down a little bit you'll find ultimate walker and it tells you what his features are and the all important thing is this download button here. So make sure you download it which I have already done. So if you have a look here I have downloaded walker so we'll just open that up. Okay so this is what it looks like once you get him open with no animation on him or anything. So here he is, handsome chap so he's quite a simplified rig. He hasn't got arms or a head, he doesn't need them because he's just we're just learning the kind of mechanics of getting the legs animated in this video. So that's that's kind of all we need. Okay so in addition to the rig that we've got we also need some reference stuff. So if we go back out to the internet, high internet and I'm going to be looking for some video reference first of all and I'm going to be using 3d.sk who have kindly agreed to sponsor this tutorial so thank you very much for that and it's just as well really because I'm using their video reference. So what I'm going to do first of all is find a walk cycle, a video walk cycle that I like the look of. So to do that I'm going to go in here now the first thing I'm going to change is a clothes type because you see there's a nude thing here and if I was to leave that as anything there would be so so much nudity. So we'll just go for casual clothes I think in this instance. We're going to have a look in the video section and I want walking video and I'm also going to change the search for two videos here and then when I click on search here we go and I actually want to use this first one so she's just going to walk across I think and there's also one where she walks forward as well. So we'll just go for this first one here make sure it opens up alright and this is what I want it to be. Yeah so that's just kind of showing how she walks like that. So I'd highly recommend doing that because what I've done is I've broken this down a little bit so if we have a look here I've actually taken the video and I've broken it down into the poses and you can see I've also assigned some frame numbers to them which I'll talk about how I did that shortly. But you can see we've got each of the poses so this one here is the first contact pose. The good thing about kind of getting video reference when you break it down is you can see all the different things that change so I think if it's the first time you've done a walk cycle you'd maybe fall into the trap of thinking it's just the legs that you need to move which is not the case you actually need to be moving more than that and you see in this example here if we look at where the hip is over here um in fact that's just um yeah you can see it's more this this bit here and this bit you can see that this is kind of facing forward whereas over here that bit of the hip has gone. So the actual hips are rotating as well which is something that you really need to look at. As well as that you can kind of get a feel for what the shape of the kind of legs is in each frame so you can see that one like that is not quite the feet are up in the air so that's worth looking at and on this one here we can kind of get up from the hips and we can see there's a bend but the toes are lifting so we're going to get that kind of that shape there where there's still something in contact with the floor so breaking these down and having a look kind of what's happening on on each frame is a really good way to do things and I would highly recommend going to somewhere like 3d.sk for their reference video or filming yourself doing the movements that you're looking at because your animation will be a lot stronger because you've taken the time to do that. This is what it looks like from the side if we have a look at the front as well we can also see some important stuff so we saw that the hips are kind of rotating backwards and forwards but they also rotate up and down so if we look here so she's got her right leg down and this leg is contacting but you can see the hips are kind of going down in that direction and then when she swapped legs so once this one here is the one that's forward you can see that the hips the rotation of them has changed so when we're animating this we also need to be aware of this and put some rotation into the hips and here although it's not perfectly straight it kind of should be so you can see that the rotation of the hips is happening all the way through and that's something that we need to get into the animation as well that is what this video reference can be really critical for for really getting that understanding of what's happening so in addition to that you can see here i've got these frame numbers and these are very specific frame numbers we're going to be animating this on 12s which is animation speak for the kind of speed that we're going to be doing so that's two steps per second so we're going to have left foot forward right foot forward and that's going to happen in one second and where i've got these frame timings from is from a book would you believe so i want to show you this book because it's ace this one here there you go can you see it there it is this is called the animators survival kit and if there was a bible for animation it would be this it is so good and i will try and show you what i'll do is think i'll overlay some video over this section so you can see what i'm looking at but you've got the different poses here have been laid out but more importantly on the other page the frame timings are there so you can see that the first contact has been put on frame one and the last contact is put on frame 13 and that's for one step so we know that we are going to double that so that we can have two steps it shows you where the passing pose should be and where the up and down pose should be and this book is phenomenal so what i'm going to do is i'm going to link to this book because if you want to be an animator you should own this book it should be with you at all times to give you an idea of kind of the depth that it goes into there's about a hundred pages covering walk cycles it then moves on to runs and stuff like that so it's ridiculously good for the fundamentals so i'll put a link below to somewhere that you can buy the book probably amazon and if i can figure it out it it might be a referable link so i might get a kickback if i can work out i'd set that up but i should probably state that now just in case i do get that set up yeah check this book out this is where i'm getting the timings from for this walk cycle so i'm using a lot of a lot of reference material to get this this working so i've got video reference i'm also looking at the animation guide in this book i'm getting frame timings and it's all going to come together in the next step when we start putting the contact poses in with that said the next thing that we need to look at let's go back into maya we just want to get maya set up for creating this animation so the first thing i'm going to do is kind of change my workspace so up in the top corner we're set to maya classic which is great for most things but i want a little bit more on screen i'm just going to kind of change the layout so i'm going to drop this down and go to animation which is the one at the bottom and you'll see this changes a few things now we've got um this is a a graph editor down the bottom which is really going and we'll use the graph editor later on and we've also got this here but i don't want this so i'm going to tap space bar and it should put me into the four view which it does that's exactly what i want and then i'm going to pull this down because i only want two of you so i've got my perspective you over here and this is the top view which is not actually what i want so i'm just going to change this panel to orthographic side and this is the view i want so i'm just going to zoom in a little bit on this because i'll do most of the animation in the orthographic views so this is what i want to see here is just kind of for preview purposes but this this one here is the important view okay so i've got that set up the next thing i want to do is go into the the settings so let's click on this little chap down here i love this guy looks like he's being attacked by a cog oh he's chasing me no uh so here he is uh right so i'm just going to change that to start at one like that and um we also want to make sure that the playback speed is on real time 24 frames per second like that so that's what i'm going for so we'll leave that one there i also want to change something else i'm going to go to the animation settings here and we're looking at the default in and out tangent and what tangents are are the shape of your animation curves and we'll cover this a little bit later so at the moment they're set to auto i don't like leaving it auto because then i feel like i'm not in control so i'm going to change this to being spline which i'm quite comfortable with i may well change them away from being spline when i'm making the tweaks later but i'm going to have them at spline now because i'm comfortable so we'll click on save okay so that's basically my set up for this animation uh there's one more thing we need to do so i'm starting at frame one but i need to end at frame 25 so i'm just going to tap 25 in this box and press enter yay so we're going from one to 25 which will allow me to put in the timings um that i just kind of showed you okay so before we can actually get any animation done we're going to turn on one last thing this is called uh auto key and it's amazing so it lives here this little icon just here there you go auto keyframe toggle we click on that you see it stays on and what this does on frame one in the next step we're going to set keys on everything so all the controllers um and then whenever we move onto another frame and change anything what will happen is it will automatically drop a keyframe on their forearms which is a ridiculously good time saver it can also keep your your graphs a little bit neater as well so we need to have that on right we're now ready to move on to the next step and start doing some animation so the next step we're going to set up the first contact pose which will be on frame one um so make sure that you've got all your settings like i've got check out the animated survival kit and also have a look at 3d.sk for some reference stuff and i will see you in the next step where we'll get the first pose put together