I have only made 3 films so far so I'm still learning. Train to Catch was my first effort and the script called for a lot of running/walking so I did spend quite a bit of time developing walk cycle tests. The cycle is over 8 frames and is replayed at 25 or 30 fps. A tutorial is a good idea, but I want to work on it a bit more.

There are two main obstacles in making it convincing with a mini-fig. The first is most people do there walks from stud to stud. This gives a staggered movement, like a pigeon walking. I have been using blutac to fix the character to the ground, which means they can walk on studs or tiles equally as well but also at a consistent pace.

The 2nd is that the mini-fig should raise up and down during the walk, but the point where the fig should be highest is when the legs are spread the most (which has the fig too low). I haven't tried to correct this yet, next film.

My best walk sample is in my film "Go Mini Man Go". The camera tracks the walk left to right while a whole bunch of figs walk along (The lead characters hat changes around 0:34) With all the legs and arms moving on 1/2 dozen figs it's very time consuming. That one scene (40 frames) took over 4 hours to record. I was luckly as not all the legs/arms were visible.
You can download GMMG (480x360, 25.11MB) from Vimeo and replay it back frame by frame using Quicktime player. Hope that helps. All the best

Last edited by pe668 (January 7, 2009 (03:19am))