Day 22 - Starting the walk animation

What I did today:
Today I started following the tutorial on how to do the walk cycle.
Before I started however I noticed a problem with the model I had chosen. The problem was with the rig as it the leg bones for the rig had not been made properly and were not producing the results I wanted for the motion of the legs. So to fix this I looked for another model with a good rig and I found a model from Blender Cloud.com this rig is actually for a character that was used by the official Blender demo real for one of there updates so it is very well made.

This is the model I have started using now.

The animation will be 24 frames long.

I also discovered the auto-keying feature, which is where the model will automatically keyframe on when I am moving the model. This is done by pressing the circle button just above the timeline beside the animation controls. 

For the animation itself, I started by creating the first contact points. As shown by the reference.

I first started with the characters "gate".  A gate is something every person has and it is different for males and females. A gate is the neutral position of a person's hips which corresponds to the neutral position of there legs. For males, the gate is a bit further apart with the feet pointed a bit outwards like the bottom of an"A". While for females, the gate is closer together in a more closed "V" position. Because my character is a male the gate is a bit further apart.

I then went to the side position and moved the front leg forward by pressing 'G' and locking it to the y-axis by pressing 'Y' right after. Doing this moved the leg forward from its neutral position and up a bit. I then did the same thing for the back leg.

I then rotated the foot of the character up a bit and then by selecting the main torso control I moved the character down a bit until the character heel touched its restricted 'ground' area. I moved it down until the front leg bent just a bit.

Next just like the front legs foot, I rotated the back legs foot downwards till it touched the ground and caused the knee to bend a bit.

I then selected everything that I moved on frame 1 and pressed 'controlC' this copied the movements I did on frame 1 onto my 'buffer' which is just Blenders version of a clipboard. I then went to frame 25 and pressed 'controlV' to paste the copied actions to that frame. I did this so that both the end frame and beginning frame have the same keyframes so that it loops better. Having it loop seamlessly is another reason the action is copied to frame 25 which is outside the frame total. 

I then went to the middle frame which is frame 13 and pressed 'ShiftControlV' which pastes the actions from frame 1 and 25 but flips it so that the legs are doing the opposite than the other frames.

Here are better views of the flipped legs with the first screen capture being frame 1 while the second is a screen capture of frame 13.

What I'm doing tomorrow:

Tomorrow I will work on some of the hip movements of the character for when it's walking as well as starting on the down position shown in the reference.