Bio Motion Walker - How to Animate a Walk

Bio Motion Walker

All student animators must learn how to animate a walk cycle, creating a successful biped walk and then giving it character and personality.

One very useful resource is the Bio Motion Walker from the Bio Motion Lab, located at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

The Bio Motion Walker allows animators to move a range of sliders showing how to make a walk cycle feel masculine or feminine, heavy or light, anxious or calm, happy or sad.  

Animators study live action, and then incorporate - and exaggerate - real life in their work . The Bio Motion Walker is a useful tool for analysing how people walk and move in different ways.  

You can find the Bio Motion Walker here.

Ways to Animate a Walk - which is best?
One of the most common questions student animators ask when they tackle their first walk cycle is this: is it better to animate the walk cycle "on the spot", as if on an imaginary treadmill, or is it better to animate the character physically walking across the screen, taking two steps? 

Choose Your Method

Walk Cycle from "The Animator's Survival Kit"

Both methods of creating a cycle are effective approaches to the problem of character walks, and at Escape Studios we teach both methods. Both, however, have their advantages and disadvantages.

Two Kinds of Walk Cycles
Watch this five minute video here to understand the difference between the two approaches, and decide for yourself which one suits you best.

Walks and Character Walks

"Journey of Life" by Robin Herrmann

One of the first challenges for junior animators learning their craft is to learn the art of locomotion, specifically how to animate a walk cycle, and later a character or personality walk. What makes a walk happy, or sad? Angry, or fearful? Masculine, or feminine? 

Animators must learn to observe how humans act and move, and be able to replicate that character and personality in their motion. 

On production, creative choices on how an animated character walks and moves will say a lot about their personality. 

Fixing a Floaty Walk Cycle

How do you fix a floaty walk cycle? Walk cycles tend to be floaty because junior animators often (make that usually) forget to add the "squash" or "down" position in which both feet are bearing the weight of the body. It's an easy mistake to make, especially if you are animating a walk "on the spot", on an imaginary treadmill, where the character's body stays still and the feet travel backwards.  In this ten minute video I show exactly what the problem is, and how to solve it. The solution is simple - but only when you know how to fix it. 

More on Locomotion
We have many free resources on walks (and locomotion generally). Follow the links below to find out more about walks and character walks.

• How to stop feet sliding in a walk cycle
• Why animators need treadmills for walk cycles 
• Why animators like Sine Waves
• Animating the "ZigZag Walk" on "The Thief & The Cobbler" 
• Two Ways to Animate a Walk Cycle - Which is Best?
• Character Walks by Alexander Savchenko
• Why animators should always take two steps
• Character Walk reference by Houman Sorooshnia
• 100 Ways to Walk by Kevin Parry

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK.