Simple Run Tutorial (Patreon)

People seem to really want a walk/run tutorial, so here's one! Walk/run are very complicated animations so I did my best to come up with the simplest run I could. My plan is to make more tutorials on the same topic later, focusing on individual parts, like the arms, legs, head movement, inclination, etc.

My biggest advice for people learning how to make walk/run animations is pay attention to the head movement.  Even if the legs and arms movements are not that great, the animation will still convince people if the head movement is good.

Now, let me explain why I chose this particular run cycle. I think a lot of people won't like my "jump" frame and will prefer to use the "pas pos." frame, that looks kinda like this:

That's totally fine, this is just the simplest and easiest way I could think of making a run that effectively would work in a platformer. Walk/run animations shows a lot of the personality of the character, so there are infinite variations on how that animation can be done.

The reason that I opted for that "jump" frame is that it's so easy to duplicate it and just drop one or two pixels, move the arms and legs a little to make the "fall down" frame. So, I usually find that method effective for fast run animations.

Another reason is if the first frame is a jump it looks like the character jumped into movement, making the animation more dynamic.