Walk Cycles in After Effects

Dive into the essentials of character animation with this comprehensive tutorial on creating walk cycles in After Effects. Learn how to utilize a pre-built character rig, understand inverse kinematics, and animate a convincing walk cycle step-by-step. Explore the fundamentals of rigging, character controls, and animation techniques specific to After Effects. Gain practical insights from an experienced motion designer on approaching character animation, even without extensive background in the field. Apply these skills to enhance your motion design projects and expand your creative toolkit.

Joey Korenman : What's up Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 12 of 30 days of after effects. Today's video is something I'm really excited to be able to show you. It's been requested a lot. Actually the topic is creating a walk cycle and after effects with the character. Now, the character rig we'll be using was built by Morgan Williams, who is not only an instructor in the department of motion design at the Ringling college of art and design, but who also teaches our character animation bootcamp and rigging academy courses. And the artwork was done by my good buddy, Joe Russ for his indie video game, Jenny LeCLue. I'm really excited to be able to use the artwork in this tutorial. So if you haven't checked out, Jenny LeClue, look for the link on this page. Anyway, let's hop into after effects and talk about making a walk cycle.
Joey Korenman :
Joey Korenman : So what I'm going to show you guys is how I made this walk cycle. Um, and again, I'm not a character animator, so this is, you know, I'm sure, uh, you know, a real character animator could pick this thing apart and, and tell me everything I did wrong. Um, but I'm hoping that, you know, what I can teach you guys is at least how to approach this. Um, and you know, maybe be able to use this in your own, your own work. So this is the final result. And let me first show you the character rig. Okay. Now, like I mentioned in the intro, this is ou. This is, uh, the main character in Joe Russ's a game that he's, he's making and it's currently kickstarting. Um, as of today, August 18th, uh, there's three days left. So, um, what I w if you want to follow along, there's actually a character rig that Morgan Williams at Ringling has been gracious enough to just give out for free.
Joey Korenman : And it's this rig here is based on that one. And the control, a lot of the controls are the same and it should work the same. Um, and I'm not going to get too much into the actual rigging part because rigging is a totally different subject. It's a lot more complicated. There's a ton of expressions going on here. And at some, maybe there'll be a video about that. This is strictly about character animation, but I just want to show you some of, you know, some of the, the controls here, right? You can see that there's a whole bunch of NOLs, uh, and, um, you know, in this comp here, this rig comp, there's a ton of layers that have been hidden by the shy switch. Okay. There's a whole bunch of things that you don't need to see. Um, and when you hide those all you're left with are these Knowles, right?
Joey Korenman : So this snowball controls the eyeballs, uh, this snow here controls the hair and you can kind of get little hair wiggles and stuff. Um, and then you've got the main controls, like, you know, this foot, this foot, um, each hand has a control and you, and if you, you know, if you're noticing there's a lot of automatic stuff happening, if I move the hand, the elbow bends correctly, the shoulder rotates all by itself. And this type of a rig is called an inverse kinematic rig. It's a fancy word. It basically means rather than rotating the shoulder than the elbow than the wrist, you just move the wrist in after effects, figures out sort of backwards what the, what the previous joint should be doing. Okay. Um, and you've got all these controls and really rigs like this are super fun to play with this, uh, cog center of gravity Knoll here.