I hate doing walkcycles

[Babar]

And then I leave them till the end, then I'm stressed about deadlines, and then have to worry about all the bugs the walkcycles introduced, it's all such a big hassle.

There are a couple of wireframe guides for walkcycles that I've tried painting over, but especially for front and back views, they never look right. The character walking towards the screen either widens their legs (as if the vanishing point was just behind them, or you can see the soles of their feet, which usually doesn't make sense.

How do you deal with this? I remember there were a couple of walkcycle generators, but trying them now, either the sites are dead, or they don't work any longer.

Also, how do you plan the rest of the game around your walkcycles? Are all your BG horizons approximately in the same place? Do you limit vertical movement?

[AndreasBlack]

Tbh first we need to lay down the ground rules what are we talking. 320-200px or 640 x 480, etc? Anyhow suggestion is to make it simple for yourself search for sprite sheets of games that you like and draw over them and change it a little bit to your taste, and eventually once you get a hang of it do your own or perhaps modify theirs a little. There's no pixelart police coming for ya, you know?

[cat]

I just checked the Animator's Survival Kit and even there is almost nothing about front walkcycles.

What you can do is limit vertical space of the walk-able area. This will also avoid scaling issues. Then you can just use side walkcycles (also for front and back) but have an extra standing frame facing front and back, respectively. There should be a checkbox to skip the standing frame when walking.

You could also search for reference material, like Eadweard Muybridge

[Jabbage]

Front and back walk cycles I really loathe because they always looks weird to me, I designed my whole game to limit how much you actually end up seeing them (which turns out has its own issues...) But I think that working in a low resolution helps hide some of the limitations in my abilities.

One thing which helped me is that I ended up using an animation application which lets me use layers so I don't have to animate everything perfectly at once. First I focus on getting the correct up-down motion of the torso, then I worry about the legs, and then I worry about the arms. Somehow that method seemed to click for me, and I ended up quite enjoying doing the side profile animations.

[VampireWombat]

One thing I've done before is use Mixamo and Blender together to create frames to work from. I've also just taken screenshots from animation for reference.

[Babar]

One thing I've done before is use Mixamo and Blender together to create frames to work from. I've also just taken screenshots from animation for reference.

Do you have a reference I can steal adjust and use myself?

[Snarky]

search for sprite sheets of games that you like and draw over them and change it a little bit to your taste

I'll point out that the AGS Awards client includes an avatar gallery that auto-plays forward walk animations for a whole bunch of characters, and many of those assets have been theoretically open-sourced under a Creative Commons license. (Maybe all of them at this point? I seem to recall a discussion about removing any that weren't.) It's just that nobody has done the work of actually uploading them anywhere, but I have most of them on my computer/dropbox.

[Babar]

Please upload them so that I may steal them too?
It is worthy of the git?

[Kastchey]

I feel you. I hate doing walkcycles too. And the back view is the worst.

What I've learned over the years is, the only real way of managing it is doing tons of walkcycles, until you have dragged yourself through this torture enough to start getting the hang of it. References and templates help, but in the end you will always end up drawing a large part of it yourself, because your template doesn't have a flowing cape, or a puffy dress, or the posture and dynamics is not quite right, or you need the character to be limping or whatever else. If you need something very specific and you feel you absolutely can't get it right no matter what, or just looking for a template, you can try browsing the assets store on itch.io. There are tons and tons of animated characters there, many are free to use or very cheap, and allow derivative work.

I don't think I have ever limited vertical movement because of the walkcycles, but if you get tired of it, you can consider switching to a different design, e.g. use a floating or teleporting character (if it makes sense story-wise, of course), or drop the third person view altogether and use first person perspective.

[ThreeOhFour]

I also never worry too much about what front & back walkcycles look like too much compared to the side ones because you see them for such a short time in comparison. I try to make them look nice, sure, but if they're a bit weird I never stress too much. Lots of people hate my walkcycles though so maybe my advice ain't the best 

[mkennedy]

On the show "South Park" they don't even bother with walking animations. Well, maybe for that one episode with Paris Hilton they might have animated her walking.