How to Animate Walking in Photoshop

Making characters walk is fairly easy to do with animation programs like Flash. However, simple walking can be a challenge for the limited animation capabilities of a program like Photoshop. Fortunately, with a little effort and planning you can use Photoshop to animate walking.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Draw your character. Draw in direct or three-quarter profile to keep your animation simple. Create your character on five layers from bottom to top: inside leg, inside arm, body and head, outside leg, outside arm. Draw the arms and legs straight down from the shoulders and hips with a slight bend at knees and elbows for a more natural look.

2. Select the inner arm with the move tool. Change the registration point in the tool options palette to top center and rotate the inner arm -30 degrees from the shoulder (changing the registration point will anchor the point of rotation at the shoulder). Change the registration points for the other limbs and rotate the inner leg 30 degrees from the hip (in the opposite direction from the arm), the outer arm 30 degrees from the shoulder and the outer leg -30 degrees from the hip.

3. Create a layer group for your inner arm and leg and name it "Inner Limbs Step 1." Create another group for your outer arm and leg named "Outer Limbs Step 1." Duplicate the groups five times changing the names to "Step 2," "Step 3" up to "Step 6" (this may seem tedious, but Photoshop doesn't let you track a layer in different rotations during animations). Make sure the "Inner Step" layers are beneath the "Body" layer and the "Outer Step" layers are above the "Body" layer.

4. Reduce the opacity of every layer group to 50 percent (this will give the effect of onion skinning, or tracing paper, so you can see through one layer to the layers beneath). Hide all of the layers except for "Inner Limbs Step 2," "Outer Limbs Step 2" and the body/head layer. Rotate the inner arm and outer leg 12 degrees from the shoulder and hip and the outer arm and inner leg -12 degrees from shoulder and hip.

5. Hide the "Step 2" layer groups and show the "Step 3" groups. Rotate each limb in the same direction as the previous groups but double the degree of rotation from 12 to 24. Repeat for the remaining steps increasing the degrees of rotation to 36, 48 and 60. When you finish you will illustrate a half of a step (you can show all of the layers at once to see the progression of limbs).

6. Open the animation palette and click on the "Duplicates Selected Frames" button until you have six frames showing. Select "Frame 1" then show the body/head and two "Step 1" layer groups and hide the remaining layer groups. Select "Frame 2" and show the body/head and "Step 2" layer groups (hiding the rest). Repeat for each frame (you can click the playback button at any time to see the animation).

7. Select "Frame 2" through "Frame 6" and click the duplicate frames button again (you will copy them at the end of the animation). Select the new "Frame 7" through "Frame 11" and choose "Reverse Frames" from the animation palette's options menu. The five frames will now play back in reverse. Click the playback button to see your character walk.

Tips & Warnings

• Practice animating with oval shapes (large oval for body, smaller ovals for arms and legs) before you move to human figures. This will help you work some of the wrinkles out.
• As you become more familiar with the animation process you can experiment with rotation angles to vary the steps. This will create a more natural rhythm.
• Make sure your animation palette is in frames mode if you have CS3 Extended (or a later version that supports frame and timeline animation).
• Some older versions of Photoshop don't have animation capabilities. Make sure your version includes an animation palette in the Windows menu.
• Don't select "Frame 1" when duplicating frames to reverse the motion. If you do, the animation will play the frame twice (at the beginning and end) and the animation will appear to skip.