Help with creating walking animation

[captain_clayman]

So i'm making this game, and i'm creating sprites for the main character, Major Griffin.
I'm not really experienced with Walking animations or motions, so it's really hard.  

Here's the Character standing upright.


btw, he's a dinosaur space marine.
any help or tutorials or sketches or edits would help alot.

[Altoontoon]

Hi Captain. Well, i hope this may be usefull for you.
First of all, i think you must break down your character in separate pieces. The animated and the non animated ones. Of course, you dont have to draw
all parts of the character in all the frames. Your dino have a gun in his hands, this helps to make easy for animate, so arms and gun dont move, only follow the body's
movement. So i think you only need to animate the legs. Well, the way is this:

First of all , understand the poses you need. For a simple walk cycle you need 4 poses.



Notice that frame for even a easy way, the poses are really 2...1 and 3 are similar, the only difference is the foot that is steping on. 2 and 4 the same, i copied the frame 2 and only redraw and erase to it looks the red leg is in front of us.

This sample is running at 5 fps. You will wish your animation be more soft and  more elaborate. With this key poses you can inbetween 1 frame and duplicate the level of detail for this movement. Like this:



Same work, so walking is a symetrical movement, the poses we draw can be reused with little variations for both legs. This is running at 10 fps, this provides a acceptable animation sensation.

Last step is join our body or other parts.



With this base walk cycle, you can now experiment and add some animations how the tail, the bullets or the spin of the head.

I was help you? I hope so.

[Ben2theEdge]

I don't agree that you should break your character into animated and non-animated pieces. This is not how things move - the entire body is involved with even a seemingly simple action. Animate the whole body as a rough sketch first and then decide which pieces you can re-use, if any, when you do the final pass. Otherwise I promise you'll get very stiff and lifeless animations every time.

[CrazyMLC]

I worked with Pivot - a stickfigure animation software - for a while years ago, I got pretty good at it, and every movement in he body is involved in walking, as Ben said.
when your legs are spread out the rest of the body is generally straight, and by the time you have both of your legs in the center, your back is a little more compressed, and when you move back down your back decompresses. There is also an ever so slight chicken movement, you know how they move when they walk.
I'll make something in a bit as an example.