Now, I'm going to go a little bit into how to start
your animation and how to use footage as a reference if you want to.
It can be really helpful, but you don't necessarily need to.
You can see here that I've imported a video actually into my Procreate Timeline,
and that if I play it,
it shows this guy walking,
which I downloaded from the good old Internet.
It's one of the only blank walk cycle videos I could find,
but it's actually pretty helpful because it does match
a little bit the attitude that I'm going for.
But for us, we're just going to look at the key poses.
If you do want to import your own footage reference,
or if I even want to film yourself walking or anything like that,
you can just go to how you normally import
an image over here in Settings and do Insert a photo,
and then you can actually just select your video,
and it'll import automatically as frames if you have the timeline open.
The one thing that you're going to want to look out for
with importing video is that it will
convert to whatever frames per seconds the video itself already had.
Either you can convert that on your computer and convert it to 12 frames per second,
or 24, or when you pull it into here,
you can do it yourself just by deleting every other frame,
which is tedious but it does work if you don't want to
deal with any other video formatting.
So I've already done that in this example.
We're already at 12 frames per second.
I've actually also flipped the footage so it
matches the direction that my character is going to be walking in.
If I play through, you can see,
I've also adjusted so that the feet land perfectly,
and you can see the grid of the background is moving.
We can just ignore that,
because right now this looks like a pretty perfect loop of him walking.
In this file, I'm basically just looking at this video,
and I'm going to see where he's at his most extended,
such as this frame and when he is at his tallest, height-wise,
when his body is up the farthest and his leg is crossing over right here.
So those are the two poses that I'm going to be looking for on either side.
It's going to need to be mirrored on both sides since obviously he can't just
take one step and then we loop it because he will be hobbling with one leg and it'll pop,
so we need to do both sides.
So it'll be four poses total.
So here I've carved out what his pose is anatomically.
You don't really need to do anything this crazy.
You could also literally just do,
here's his arm and here is the shape of his body, etc,
and you will have something enough to use as reference as long as it's not to jinky.
So in this case we're just pointing out where his anatomy is and this isn't
too important for you guys because we aren't going super far into anatomy,
it is just helpful to see where
each part of his body is at so you can reference that later.
So we have a cross frame, front frame,
the other cross frame,
and then the other front frame,
so it loops completely back to the beginning.
These are the poses that we're going to reference as we go forward.
So if you see without the footage behind it,
it will still make sense physically.
This stuff isn't required at all.
It's just something that you can do if you're a little
confused about how a walk cycle works to begin with.
It is helpful to look at it naturally if you're having
a hard time wrapping your head around the different poses that we're talking about.
Now I'm going to show you a little bit how we can apply
these keyframes to our animation layout.
I've taken each of these keyframes that we picked out and drew over
from our footage walk cycle and I've held them on the timeline for six frames each.
I've kept the different frames that were between it on the footage.
So each of them has about five to six frames between each of our keyframes.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go on our keyframes on the timeline and tap
right here and have "Hold For Five More Frames."
So overall, it's six frames per pose.
Now when I play through, it's just our poses,
but it's holding for the correct amount of time and you can
get the overall impression of our walk cycle.
This is basically where we want to get with
our first very rough keyframes with our own character and you can use this as reference,
you can use any other footage that you find that's a little
more accurate to the mood that you're going for,
but this is just so you can wrap your head around
the basic steps that we're going to be taking and how it relates to a real walk cycle.