This overview of the humaniod run cycle animation is a continuation of the Walk Cycle setup and animation. If you haven't reviewed the Walk Cycle setup yet please do so as it has vital information to setting up your humanoid that is needed for this run cycle overview. You can find the Walk Cycle Setup and Animation HERE.

Before we begin, you should have some form of a humanoid character modeled and your humanoid should have the pivot points and hierarchy setup correctly as demonstrated in the Introductory Walk Cycle Setup.

With that said, lets animate a run cycle! As you may have noticed it is pretty easy to animate a walk cycle. So you would assume that animating a run cycle is pretty easy as well, well, it is! If you simply adjust your characters limb positions and body position a little you'll end up with a smooth walkcycle.

Using the following diagram as a reference, position your humanoid as shown, at the specified frames on the timeline (Be sure to depress the animate button first).

The walk cycle setup should be done in the Left and/or Right viewports only.
The only items you will need to animate your humanoid are the Hierarchy window and the Rotation trackball. The Move tool will only be used to animate the pelvis (aka: entire humanoid figure) of your character up and down – as the red lines show.

(Note: If you get the upper torso to rotate a little around the Y axis it will emphasise the effort the humanoid is putting into the run and add an even more human-like movement.)

Give it a shot and feel free to submit your run cycle to submittals@erain.com. If you want to step up your animation to the next level, animate your character going from a walk cycle to a run cycle and then back to a walk cycle!

Cheers!

Hi JFoley, great example once again. Why aren´t there sourcefiles availabe for that? I´m sure if you put them online we´ll see great animations in the future with Swift 3D!

I love animation, but i cant use swift 3d, what can i do,i want to learn it, can i make 3d objects and use them in flash

Hi I am doing a presentation on marathon running and we have to use power point. I would love to use the above animation in my presentation so i can show the running cycle, however am not sure how to get it from this page to my power point. I tryed to copy and paste this but it would not work, please help
Cheers
Danelle.