Custom animations - Walk Cycle

When planning the walk cycle, I quickly realised that the legs were essentially doing the same animation on each side, just at offset times.

I hatched a plan to animate both legs at the same time and use the graph editor to offset the animations to the correct time.

First I made the animation with both legs simultaneously. It looks silly, but you get the idea.

The next step was to create the offset.

First I copied the entire animation again further down the timeline using the graph editor so that there would be enough animation after I created the offset.

Next I used the graph editor to offset only the right side animation, making sure that the offset lined up correctly, exactly half way between the leg sweep.

As you can see below, this is the walk animation in a very basic form, before cleanup.

After that, it was the cleanup and detail steps.

When walking, more than just the legs move, so I created some movement in the arms, hips and upper body, as well as keeping the head facing straight ahead.

I used the relaxed axe hold on the right side because I felt an asymmetrical body pose gave a more interesting animation.

The final animation can be seen below. I wanted to give him a lot of bounce in his step, like he has a lot of weight and is quite cocky.