Original subtitles

- [Instructor] Before we jump into animating our character,

we will go through a little reference analysis.

Here are a couple of references you can use

and that we are going to analyze.

As usual, you will find a link in the documentation.

As for the run cycle, we can identify specific key poses

that we are going to block.

The first one is the contact pose,

where the front foot heel is contacting the ground

and the body starts to get lower.

Then, a few frames later, we have the down pose.

This is the time where the back foot

is about to leave the ground,

and where the center of gravity is at its lowest point.

This is also the moment where the weight is totally shifted

onto the side of the foot touching the ground.

Next is the passing pose.

Generally, the arms are almost aligned with the body

and the center of gravity is aligned

with the supporting foot.

The back foot is catching up

just before the up pose, or pushing pose.

This is the time where the COG is at its highest point.

The contacting foot heel is starting to raise,

while the opposite foot is swinging forward pretty fast.

And the center of gravity

is starting to move toward the next contact pose.

And so the cycle repeat on the other side.

So as for our run cycle,

a classic walk cycle can be mirrored.

As for the run cycle, we will have

to nail the center of gravity up-and-down motion,

and also left-to-right motion.

Let's have a look to the shoulder and hips

of those walking characters.

Let's start with the twisting motion

on the rotation around the vertical axis.

As for the run cycle, it's pretty straightforward.

The hips will twist toward the leading foot.

So on this contact pose,

the hips are twisting toward the left foot

and the shoulders are twisting the opposite way.

So we will find here a lot of common mechanism

that we add during the run cycle,

and those mechanism will also apply

whenever we are animating other body mechanic.

The other classic motion is the leaning of the shoulder

versus the leaning of the hips.

If we have a look to the down pose,

which is one of the most contrasted pose,

the hips are raising toward the contacting foot

because the leg is pushing to support the weight.

And as seen during the run cycle,

we have a contrapose here also,

where the shoulder are leaning the opposite way.

When we were walking on the run cycle animation,

we have seen that the shoulder

were kind of leading the animation,

pulling the body forward and upward.

Think of the walk cycle as a controlled falling forward.

We push our body forward, and as we fall, our foot catch up.

The arms are swinging in reaction;

they are not leading the animation.

And so we get a pendulum, or swinging motion,

back and forth, with an easing on both extreme

and a subtle drag of the hands.

We will also have a bit of a swinging motion in the feet,

and as the feet contact the ground,

it then move at constant speed.

There is also a bit of left-to-right motion on the feet

where, during the passing pose,

they get on the outside, and during the contacting pose,

they are a bit on the centered line beneath the character.

These are some of the basics that we do need to nail

when we are going to (indistinct) our walk cycle.

We could analyze those references for a long time,

but let's get into blocking our walk cycle

and we'll get into detail

whenever we are polishing each part of the character.