Learn to animate walk cycles with this free masterclass.
Despite working in 3D computer animation for my entire career, most of what I’ve learnt about the art of animation has come from some of the world’s best hand drawn animators.
The truth is, regardless of the medium that we use, the same principles of animation still apply.
With that in mind, I wanted to share an excellent walk cycle masterclass from animator James Baxter.
If you’re not familiar with James Baxter, he’s had a long and successful career as both a hand drawn and 3D animator.
Starting out on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he went on to supervise characters at Disney including Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Rafiki in the Lion King, and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. From there, he moved to DreamWorks where he spent many years working as both a 2D and 3D animator. More recently he has been overseeing all of the animation coming out of Netflix as their Director of Character Animation.
Hopefully, that should be enough of a biography to tell you that he certainly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to animation.
Whilst everything in this masterclass is demonstrated using hand drawn animation, it is all still fully applicable to 3D animation. In addition, since he’s worked as both a 2D and 3D animator, Baxter highlights a number of things which are specific to 3D.
I hope that you enjoy the video and, if it has you excited to start animating characters within Blender, you may want to check out my Into Action course.
Into Action is a 12 week programme, which goes well beyond the basics of walks and runs, to help you master character animation body mechanics within Blender.
