7 Common Mistakes in Walk Cycle Animation - Tips to Detect and Fix them

Here’s your quick guide on detecting and fixing mistakes when creating walk cycle animation. All the examples in this video are based on the most common mistakes that the students of our Motion Beast course made. In this course, we teach animation in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Animate to beginners and intermediate-level students. It has a bunch of After Effects tutorials as well as significant block dedicated to character animation.

Let us know in the comments if you want more walk cycle tutorials or videos dedicated to character animation. We would be more than happy to record them :D

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Timelines
0:00 Motion Design School Logo
0:04 Introduction
0:25 1. Phases from Hell
1:00 2. Simultaneous movement
1:40 3. Don't move walk cycles!
2:43 4. Indistinguishable Up and Down
3:37 5. Asymmetrical poses
4:23 6. Uneven movement of supporting leg
5:25 7. Wooden feet syndrome
6:02 Things to check
7:06 Conclusion
7:47 Outro

[andyboatwright]

I've now learnt how to move my legs and arms in real life thanks.

[THUNGUNS]

Best tutorial/guide for animating walk cycles. Doesn't focus too much on the technicalities and lets us learn the principles.

[osgarlo]

0:00 Motion Design School Logo
0:04 Introduction
0:25 1. Phases from Hell
1:00 2. Simultaneous movement
1:40 3. Don't move walk cycles!
2:43 4. Indistinguishable Up and Down
3:37 5. Asymmetrical poses
4:23 6. Uneven movement of supporting leg
5:25 7. Wooden feet syndrome
6:02 Things to check
6:14 I. Contact Pose
6:20 II. Passing Pose
6:34 III. Up and Down poses
6:41 IV. The movement of a body
6:49 V. Don't forget details
6:56 VI. Motion Paths
7:02 VII. Volume
7:06 Conclusion
7:47 Outro

[Hjkhjfhhhgch]

Another bit of advice that helped me loads was to step away from the animation for a bit. I try and switch up the shots i'm working on to give my brain a break so I can see mistakes I made when I return to it.

[kennetherhabor]

Thanks for this. Learnt a few new things about walk cycle animation that I hadn't paid attention to before or I just overlooked. Please keep the character animation tutorials coming.

[flubble]

Thank you ! I love how much I'm learning when all I need to do is make a pixel art character take 2 steps forward in 5 frames- it's like writing a sentence and learning 30 words on the side as a bonus !

[carcinogeneticist]

Had to model my first walk cycle for a 3D animation class I’m taking. This video was incredibly helpful! I knew about alternating arms and legs, but the rest of these tips were completely new to me and would have otherwise flown over my head!

[DavidJonRandom]

The sound is really quiet in this video. I had to set my volume in Windows from 5% to 100% to make it sound as loud as other videos.

[rqkvhur]

It's always a big help. Thanks for the content.

[motionlabstudio]

I can't tell you how many times our freelancers have got the arm and leg swings in the wrong order! My goodness. Great video!

[jeorc]

Thanks for sharing. This is pretty valuable information.

[cayoyoshimura]

Loved the content, nice explanation and examples!

[annafromm]

Thank you! Very usefull video! Found out my own mistakes! will try to improve my animations further

[sorituanasution]

I'm really having trouble in making this, hopefully i can get it done right this time...
Thanks for the knowledge you sharing👍

[Mohit_N.R]

This was really helpful, Now I know ehat I was missing. Thank you !! ❤️

[wqncorr]

Урок отличный, хотелось бы видеть больше таких видео !)

[pimmiebear]

walk is a simple and hardest thing to do! THANKS a lot guy!

[aymenhaq]

I consult this video a lot and this is so funny, especially the part with moving the walk cycles.

[FREDO-pyti]

Thank you for these precious advices !!!

[LOCKSHADES]

It took several suggestions for me to actually take time to read your thumbnail and even then it took me being insecure with my animation to actually try this out.

I could have missed out on a lot just because of a thumbnail😅