DT: Walk Cycle Stage 2 | Down Position

The next stage of our walk cycle finds us sorting out the first big movements happening on what's considered the DOWN POSITION of our character's walk. Key areas to notice and implement are:

1. At each DOWN POSITION [two key frames in this case] finds one foot firmly planted on the ground and the other with its heel tilted at an upward angle such that just the very tippy toes are grazing the ground as this foot is getting ready to go up into the air and pass the other foot at the PASSING POSITIONS.

2. The center of gravity should be lowered to its lowest point at each DOWN POSITION.

3. The foot that begins the cycle should now be planted flat on the ground at the 1st DOWN POSITION as it begins to move backward. At the 2nd DOWN POSITION, the foot that began at the back is the one moving fwd and gets planted flat on the ground.

4. At the 1st DOWN POSITION, a good working method to get the foot raised just how we want it is to start with it firmly planted on the ground and then adjust some custom attributes to angle it up how we prefer. In our case we zeroed out our custom attrs and pushed the foot bkwrd along the Z axis until the heel began to raise off the ground and rested only on the toes.

5. Next we adjusted our Raise Toe custom attr to get the desired sharp bend in the knee area. Here's a pic to show what I mean:


6. At the 2nd DOWN POSITION, we make the same adjustments as above only on the opposite foot.

7. Now that we've made these adjustments, if we were to toggle between our two DOWN POSITIONS, we'd find that one foot is positioned far more fwd. We can fix this in our animation graph for the Translate Z values. We want the first part of our curve to come straight in and then ease out. To achieve this we take the 1st key and make it LINEAR TANGENTS, We then select the 2nd key and BREAK its TANGENTS and adjust the left side so the curve comes straight in while providing the ease-out on the right side. We then FLATTEN TANGENTS on the last key and this places our fwd foot at each DOWN POSITION, in the same spot. Here's an example of the graph: