Animating the walk cycle
In this section, we will bring our character to life by animating a walk cycle using keyframes. The amazing part of keyframe animation is that we only need to create a few easy poses and Blender will automatically fill in the gaps by adding the frames between each of our key poses. I will show you how you can create a complete walk cycle by just creating four poses!
In the following reference diagram, you can see the four key poses. These are the only poses we need to create in order to animate a full walk cycle. We will first create these four poses and then invert these poses to create additional poses for the opposite side of the character. We will create these four key poses on frames 1, 10, 20, and 30, and we will position the inverted poses on frames 40, 50, 60, and 70. Let's get started!
Figure 8.35 – The four key poses needed for a walk cycle