Walks are built from the contact pose, which is the moment the heel of the front foot makes contact with the ground, and the passing position, which is where the front foot is directly underneath the body as the back leg overlaps the body as it starts to come forward.
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I always start out drawing the two contact poses first, since this works out the width of the stride. If you flip between these two contact poses, you get the impression of a walk. Of course, this looks really mechanical with only two poses, but the rest of the walk can be built from here.
A lot of early video games would make walk cycles using only these two contact poses. And games like would have the two contact poses, and one passing position in between each contact pose.
The next most important poses are the down position, which comes right after the contact pose, catching the weight of the step, and the up position, which comes directly after the passing position as the contact leg straightens and propels the body up.
Contact, Down, Passing, and Up. These 4 key poses are all that’s needed to communicate the idea of a walk. And of course, you simply repeat these 4 poses for the other foot. Now you have 8 key poses in total.
From here, you can add inbetweens to smoothen out the action.
Some other important details regarding the walk cycle is the positioning of the arms. The arms can be thought of as pendulums, with the wrists being pulled by the elbows, which are pulled by the shoulders.
You’ll notice a general arc path for these joints. If the animation looks jittery, check the path of motion for each joint to make sure they’re flowing in curved arcs rather than jagged, random positions.
There’s more detail that goes into walk cycles, but this will do for now as a basic introduction.
But how would a Zombie walk?
Something about being not alive is that the joints and muscles become stiff due to rigor mortis. The back is usually hunched over. A Zombie would appear to struggle with it’s movement, not having the flexibility and coordination of a living person. There’s an eerie sense of struggle behind every step a zombie takes.
This belabored walk can have loose and flimsy parts that contrast the stiff joints, such as the head wobbling around on a flimsy neck, and hands frozen in claw shapes that dangle from the arms.
With these ideas in mind, I’m gonna animate my Zombie walk cycle.
I was inspired by the game Plants VS Zombies. I wasted too many being addicted to this game, so I felt compelled to turn my brain rot into art. I’m designing a Zombie character as if I was hired to make one for this game (ps, this is a little side not, a little call to action, if there’s any game designers out their with fair and appropriate budgets, feel free to reach out). Plant’s vs Zombies uses 2D skeletal animation, or character rigs, which can be done in programs like Spine, Moho, and Blender. I don’t have much experience with this type of 2D puppet animation. I animated this Mummy in Moho. The extent of my knowledge working with character rigs is limited to making them bounce up and down.
Therefore, I’ll be animating my Zombie by hand, frame-by-frame in TVPaint, but this exact method can also be done in Blender Grease Pencil, ToonBoom, Krita, or any drawing program that has a timeline for playback and layers.
Animation Process:
The first thing I to start the animation process was rough out the two contact poses. Remember that the arms oppose the legs as a counter balance, so when the left foot is forward, the right arm is back, and vice versa.
From here, I’m drawing an armature or loose skeleton for the legs and pelvis. It can be hard to draw all the parts of the body at once.
Focusing on the legs first makes sure you’re building on a solid foundation for each step.
Draw the contact pose, down pose, passing pose, and the up pose. That’s 4 drawings. Now just redraw these 4 poses for the other leg to complete the full stride of both legs. In total, that’s 8 poses. Everything else will be inbetweens.
Torso/Spine
Now we can attach the spine to the pelvis. I’m keeping a kind of loose and flimsy spine, animating with an s shape as done in the wave principle.
Now attach the thorax to the spine. Im using some inner contour lines to show the direction the body will be tilting as it walks.
Then rough in the motion of the skull, which will be dangling and bobbing up and down, hanging onto a weak and flimsy neck.
Go over the body to draw in spheres for where the shoulders will connect to the arms, keeping in mind a curved path of motion.
Now we’ll add inbetweens, paying special attention to the spacing and arcs of the joints.
Here’s what it looks like so far. The overall walking motion is nailed in.
Arms
I like to do the arms on a separate pass. With the shoulder joints already established, it’s just a matter of attaching these arms to the shoulders.
And just like a pendulum sewing, the arms will slow down at the apex of the swing, and accelerate as they come back down, with the elbow moving before the wrist, and the hand delayed or offset a couple frames from the rest of the arm for some overlapping action.
Roughing
Now that the gesture is animated, I’m going to refine the design a bit. I already drew the contact poses in rough, but didn’t really nail down the Zombie design. Usually you’d want to have the character design figured out before animating, but I decided the walking motion itself would inform the design of this Zombie. Yeah, that sounds good. That sounded pretty smart. But actually I just forgot to design the Zombie first.
Zombies have parts that are stiff, like a head’s that’s tilted to the side or a hand that’s twisted around the wrong way. For this zombie, I made the shoulder facing us always a little higher than the shoulder behind the body, and kept his back always a bit hunched over. Most Zombies really don’t have great posture.
Tracking The Feet
It’s helpful to make a spacing guide to track the foot that’s on the ground. The heal leads the action of the foot. The spacing on the foot is even on a walk cycle – this is to prevent the feet from sliding around if you had a panning background moving at a consistent speed.
We also have two horizontal lines to guide the feet, one slightly below and the other slightly up. The one that is up will be the back foot, since it’s further away.
From here we can do the rough animation. The bulk of the hard thinking work is already done for us. Of course now the challenge is keeping the design consistent from pose to pose.
I’ll go through the process in sections, so that it’s not too overwhelming, starting with the legs and pelvis. I’m keeping the legs of this Zombie bent at all times, but the legs will be more bent on the down position and slightly less bent on the passing and up positions.
I’m also paying special attention to the elbows and wrists, and what is known as breaking the joints, where the joint moves in the opposite direction of the arm to create a smoother and more snappy or dynamic look.
In other words, all parts of the arm wouldn’t start or stop moving at the exact same time. An example would be the elbow starts to move or break in the opposite direction it was moving, while the wrist continues moving in the original direction, eventually being dragged along by the new direction of the elbow.
A related concept is overlapping action, which I’m applying to the loose clothing of the Zombie. You’ll notice the clothing is dragged along by the body, only changing direction after it’s pulled by the body’s force. And it takes a little time for the change in direction to occur, with the spacing of the loose clothing getting closer and slower before whipping around in the opposite direction.
Hands & Head
Now the clean Up.
I’m gonna cheat a little for the hands and head and just draw single frames for the head and each hand. I’ll put these drawings on their own layers, and use the transform tool to move them around frame-by-frame, paying special attention to the spacing between frames.
For the head, I am going to separate the jaw and space it out so that the jaw is dangling and being yanked around by the head’s motion.
Body
The roughs were already pretty tight, so the body is very straight forward. Just have to trace over the roughs, correcting any mistakes I might find along the way, and closing the gaps in lines so that the color won’t spill through once we get to the color stage.
Hair
It can be hard to key pose really loose elements like hair or tails, so I’m drawing the hair straight-ahead, one frame after another. Just like the loose ends of the clothing from before, the hair will have overlapping action and take time to reverse it’s motion as it’s pulled along by the skull.
Eye’s
The eye in the socket is going to be kinda rolling around. It’s important to make sure the pupil will be moving in an arc path, so I’m tracking the pupil here.
The other Eye will be falling out of the socket, and then yanked up, slowing at the highest point, just like with a bouncing ball, before falling back down into the socket.
Erase
With all the parts cleaned up, the final step before coloring is tto erase the bits that overlap, like parts of the skull that would be behind the dangling eye, and connecting the missing parts of the jaw back to the skull.
Color
Alright, it’s coloring time. I was having a little trouble thinking of colors, and I didn’t want to just copy the color palette of Plants vs Zombies, so my animation partner Brittany helped come up with some color ideas. All these whacky colors made me think of the villains from the ninja turtle action figures I had as a kid. I decided to go with a greenish Blue skin and a pinkish jacket. The green Zombie skin is typical, but I thought the pink and purple pants added some flair to the character design.
The Zombies clothing tells a lot about what kind of person this was in the past. This was a stylish person. At least I think. Being a bit of a geek myself, I don’t really know anything about style, but I feel like guys who wear pink and purple know things about style. The accessories we give to a character can totally change our perception of the character.
For example, giving a character glasses automatically makes them nerdy.
On the other hand, big clunky muscles often make a character seem stupid, unless you give them glasses, because poor vision that requires the aid of corrective lenses increases the intelligence stats of a guy with washboard abs.
Just look at the cover models from best selling romance novels – they may have perfectly chiseled, olympian physiques, but they’re still nerds, because they wear glasses.
I thought about doing cel shading, but being super pressed on time, I decided to skip it. I don’t really feel this one needed it anyway. But I did give the eyes some highlights just to make them pop a little more.
Animation Recap
Here’s a Quick Recap (Zombie Process): I draw the poses with basic shapes first, starting with the legs, then building the torso and head on top, followed by the swinging arms.
With this structure as a base, we can draw the rough Zombie animation over this skeleton.
Next is the clean up stage with the finished line work on it’s own layer.
And then finally, make a layer for color and add in all the colors.
