Animate a Slow Sad Walk with Monty

Animate a sad walk with Monty

Every animator needs to learn how to animate a character walk; fortunately we have 100s of animation tutorials for our students at our Vimeo Channel

In the tutorial below, we show how to take a basic walk cycle using the marvellous "Monty" rig - and then make Monty sad and depressed - with just a few clicks.  The video tutorial is recorded in Autodesk Maya, and is aimed at animation beginners. 

About "Monty"

Animate a Basic Walk with Monty

The videos use the marvellous "Monty" rig, free for download, and which you can read about here. 

Start by Animating a Basic Walk with "Monty"

The tutorial takes a basic walk cycle with Monty - read this blog post on how to achieve this. Once you have the basic walk working, you can make changes to it to give it character and personality. 

"Sad Walk" with Monty

Animate a Basic Walk

To make Monty feel sad, we need to slow down his walk, change his facial expression, and maybe even change his colour. If we change Monty from a pea-green to a faded blue, we can literally give Monty "the blues". (See our video on Colour Theory for Animators to see how to manipulate colour for visual storytelling).

Monty Sad Walk - Work Method

1. Start by using the scale tool to slow down the walk so that it takes 48 frames instead of 32. Your lastly  frame will be Frame 49
2. Clean up your keyframes so that they all sit on whole digits. ie frame 17 should be frame 17, not 17.145
3. Adjust Monty's pose so that Monty looks slouchy and sad, facing the ground. 
4. Give Monty a sad expression
5. In the Hypershade, change Monty's colour to blue.
6. Make sure that Monty's feet drag on the ground as he walks.

This should give you a sad, slow walk. 

Sad Walk Tutorial

You can find the Sad Walk Tutorial below:

https://vimeo.com/918275366

Locomotion Resources

We have many locomotion resources available to our students:

• Animation Tutorials at our Vimeo Channel - Locomotion & Mechanics
• Animate a sneaky walk with Monty
• Animate a Walk "on the spot" with Monty
• Why Animators Need Sine Waves for Walk Cycles
• Animate a Walk Cycle with "Heavy" from Team Fortress
• How to Fix Knee Pops in a Walk Cycle
• Animate a Run Cycle with Monty
• Animate a Run Cycle with "Heavy"
• Animate a Jump with Monty
• Gender Walks with the Bio Motion Lab 
• Character Walks with Hooman Soroushnia
• Character Walks with Kevin Parry
• Character Walks Tutorial with Monty
• Walk Cycle Tutorial by Amanda Costa

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