Dog Walk Cycle

The first task in our advanced animation skills workshop is the dog walk cycle.

The best way to start is to either observe from life how a dog walks, or if you don't have a dog available, there is a large amount of online data. For my first walk cycle is looked at a video provided on the animation net, which shows a series of different dogs walking at various gaits.

My first attempt at the dog walk cycle wasn't great as the back legs and front legs were a bit out of time to each other. However I think this is partly because the dog I was focusing on was very fluffy so a lot of what i drew was guess work.

So I decided to look at some videos of dogs which were less fluffy, making it easier to see the movements in their anatomy.

And I also used the tips in The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams on colour-coding the points where the legs are rising, crossing over and contacting the ground.

And then created a walk cycle like this;

The next challenge was then to animate it so that the dog went from standing still, to walking, then slowing to standing still again. So with that, this is my final walk cycle.