High Five!
Before we go any further, here is a nice tip. To stop the annoyance of flipping being recorded by the undo queue, so after flipping back and forward between frames you don’t have to undo all those actions. Helpful! Quality of narration is pretty bad. I was quite tired at the time. But here is the link to the blog post that explains things equally as well. :P
Despite the fact that most of us see our four-legged friends walking around every day, most of us-including many experts in natural history museums and illustrators for veterinary anatomy text books-apparently still don’t know how they do it.
So don’t feel bad if this walk stuff is new to you! It confuses experts too! :)
In these lessons, you’ll animate a four-legged character, a dog, to walk in a continuous way. You’ll use the ForeFeet option to make the fingers of the biped hands behave like toes on forefeet.
Autodesk has a nice tutorial on animating quadruped animals. It does use their biped character rig, but there is good information here regardless.
Has a neat little segment on quadrupeds. Very short, but includes a nice frame by frame of a llama displaying keys and breakdowns. Nice to look at.
I was struggling with a dog walk in my short so I thought it best to try to find some live action reference and rotoscope it.
Josh has a nice little blog post with thoughts on walk cycles. He also rotoshoped a dog with details thrown in so you don’t have to! Huzzah!
Also by Josh Wedlake. A nice detailed explanation of a dogs walk cycle. Informative!
A nice reference to have for walks. While they’re just slides from his presentations. It’s still a good thing to print out and keep around.
