- Block a walk cycle from the four core poses rather than inventing motion frame by frame.
- Read the graph editor as timing — and change how a motion feels by changing spacing alone.
- Build a loop that plays seamlessly, and diagnose the stutter when it does not.
- Explain why a walk with weight looks like a body and one without looks like a marionette.
Brief · 15 min Four poses, not forty
A walk cycle is one of the most analyzed motions in animation, and the analysis has produced a shortcut: almost all of a walk lives in four poses. Everything else is interpolation and refinement.
| Pose | What is happening | What to get right |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | The forward heel strikes; legs at their widest apart | The stride length — this sets the character's whole scale and energy |
| Down | Weight drops onto that leg; the hips are at their lowest | The drop should be fast. Bodies fall onto a foot |
| Pass | The free leg swings past the standing one | Hips near their highest; the standing leg nearly straight |
| Up | Push-off; the body is lifted and carried forward | The rise is slower than the drop was |
Then contact again on the opposite foot, and the cycle repeats mirrored. That is four to six poses for a full walk — not thirty.
Not bad taste. Running out of time. Students spend forty minutes polishing the contact pose until it is beautiful, then have twenty minutes left for the other three and hand in something unfinished.
Block all four poses roughly before you refine any of them. A complete rough walk can be improved; three-quarters of a lovely one cannot be watched at all.
Build · 45 min The walk
- Block the four poses
Getting in: click the Animation workspace tab at the top of the window, select the rig, and enter Pose Mode — the mode you ended Day 3 in. Then the whole keying loop is four moves:
- Set End to 24 in the Timeline — a one-second cycle at 24 fps.
- Click in the Dope Sheet to put the playhead on the frame you want to key.
- Pose the character, then A to select every bone and I → Location & Rotation. Diamonds appear on the Dope Sheet: that is a keyframe.
- Spacebar plays. Blender interpolates between your keys — the in-betweens are free.
Key contact, down, pass and up at even intervals. Keep them rough. You are establishing the shape of the motion, and you will fix everything about them later.
The Animation workspace tab: 1 viewport in Pose mode, 2 Dope Sheet below it, 3 Properties. Work here for Day 4. 
After I on a posed bone: the Rotation fields go yellow in the N panel and a diamond appears on the Dope Sheet at the current frame. Yellow means keyed on this frame; green means keyed elsewhere. - Mirror the second half for free
Ctrl+C to copy a pose, then Ctrl+Shift+V to paste it flipped. Because a walk is symmetrical, the second half of the cycle is the first half with left and right swapped. This is where the .L / .R naming from Day 3 earns its keep — if the names are wrong, paste-flipped silently does nothing.
The Pose menu in Pose mode: Copy Pose, Paste Pose, and Paste Pose Flipped — the one that mirrors left and right, provided the bones are named .L and .R. - Open the graph editor and look at spacing
Getting in: any area can become any editor — click the editor-type icon in the Dope Sheet’s top-left corner and pick Graph Editor. This is the step that turns blocking into animation. The keys' values are the poses; the spacing between keys is the timing, and timing is what the viewer actually reads.
Evenly spaced keys feel mechanical, because nothing in a body moves at a constant rate. Keys bunched near the extremes and spread through the middle feel like mass being accelerated and decelerated. Drag a few handles, play it back, and watch the character's personality change without a single pose changing.
The Graph Editor (change any area's editor type to it, or use the Animation workspace). One rotation channel from 0° to 70° and back. The shape of the curve is the timing. 
The Key menu in the Graph Editor: Interpolation Mode (T) and Easing Type are how you make a fall hit hard and a rise float. - Make the hips carry the weight
Isolate the hip's vertical curve. It should drop quickly after contact — that is gravity taking the body down onto the foot — and rise more slowly as the leg pushes off against it. If that curve is a smooth even sine wave, your character is floating, and everyone will feel it without being able to say why.
- Close the loop properly
The first and last frames must be identical. The standard method: duplicate frame 1 to the end of the range, then play one frame short of it. If you play the duplicate as well, that pose is held for two frames and reads as a small hitch every cycle — the classic walk-cycle stutter.
- Watch it loop twenty times
Set the playback to loop and just watch. Problems that are invisible in a single pass become obvious by the fifth repetition: a foot that slides slightly, a hitch at the seam, an arm swinging out of phase with the legs.
Weight. A body falls onto a foot; it does not settle gently onto it. Almost every student walk cycle is too smooth and too even, because interpolation is smooth and even by default and it takes deliberate effort to break it.
Watch someone walk across a room and pay attention only to their hips. The drop is abrupt. The rise is labored. That asymmetry is the whole illusion.
- Four core poses are blocked, and you blocked all of them before refining any.
- Paste-flipped worked, which means your bone naming survived Day 3.
- The hip curve drops faster than it rises.
- It loops twenty times with no stutter at the seam and no foot sliding.