Animate a Character in Blender: Walk Cycle

In this lecture we take the character and apply some color to help bring him to life. The material set up in the scene uses Blenders internal rendering engine. The Blender render has a very cool feature called freestyle. The freestyle feature is enabled in this scene, and along with some other lighting and material settings combine to give the cartoon style render you see when the render option is selected.

In this lecture we take a look at the armature or character rig. The rig is the name given to the set of control objects visible around the character. The character mesh has been parented to this rig and so each control object controls a certain part of the character. The control objects are selected in object mode, we press tab and select pose mode. Pose mode is where the control objects can control the movements of the character. When in pose move and a control object is selected it will have a blue shading. This control object can now be moved, scaled or rotated altaring the character as it happens.

In this lecture we manipulate the control bones and place the character into a pose we can use for animation throughout the scene. It is possible to create multiple poses and quickly jump back and forth between them.

In this lecture we create a walk cycle for the character and save it in the action editor. This allows us to repeat the walk cycle to easily animate the character within the scene.

In this lecture we create a path within the scene and position the character. We constrain the character to this path and repeat the walk cycle.

In this lecture we set the position we want the camera to start at in the scene, we set some key frames to roughly mark its path as the animation plays.

In this lecture we adjust the position of the camera to follow the character more accurately as he begins his walk cycle.

In this lecture we do some fine tuning of the character movements, also we begin to animate the rig and adjust the position of the camera in relation to the rigs movements.

In this lecture we continue to animate the rig to its next position, we also create a second scene within our animation and this allows us to switch prop and camera positions without affecting the previous scene.

In this lecture we focus on the head and face movements and apply some of the shape key we created for the face.

In this lecture we add some more key frames to the rig and adjust its rotation and position.

In this lecture we again apply the walk cycle created in lecture 5 to the character for some short steps backwards.

In this lecture we animate the controller attached to the characters hands and have him press the green button.

In this lecture we begin to animate the rigs stabilizers and arm, we also animate the movements of the camera and follow the rig on its expansion.

In this lecture we animate the characters reaction to the rig expanding with some simple movements.

In this lecture we fine tune the button press. Test renders help us view critical areas of the animation and adjust the timing accordingly.

In this lecture we begin to add the PNG images we rendered out for the scenes we created. Using Blenders video editing features allows us to quickly and easily add them in order.

In this lecture we add the sound assets and combine them with the images along the time line. The website used to gather these assets is Freesound.org and using the CC0 public domain dedication.