animation - How do you deal with transitions in animating walking?

I'm pretty new to this whole animating models thing. Just learning the ropes. I got a nice walking animation going, which I can loop while a character is walking, but what about when they stop walking?

I mean, they could be at any point in the animation at the time the player stops walking. How do I get them to smoothly return to a standing still position without having them snap into that position? The same goes for starting walking from a standing still position. Do you need a separate animation? How is this dealt with?

Answer

You can have different levels of complexity depending on the degree of realism you want.

1. 
   

   Simply blend (= interpolate) from the walk to the stand animation when the character stops walking, and vice versa when the character starts.

   
   
   


2. 
   

   Let the walk animation rate depend on the character speed, this way the walk animation will slow down prior blending to the stand animation.

   
   


3. 
   

   Use transition animations: stand-to-walk is an easy one, just play it before your walk animation starts.

   
   


4. 
   

   Getting a walk-to-stand transition to work is a bit trickier, you'll have to know where your character is is his walk cycle, and wait for him to reach the transition point. And/or have several walk-to-stand animation that start at a different walk cycle point and trigger the right one when motion stops, probably with a bit of blending as well.

   
   

This goes on and on, you can consider using IK to snap feet to the floor, use human body physics for an even more realistic-looking motion, etc. This is really a question of artistic direction, and of how much time you can spend on this.

One thing for sure: if you want to experiment on all this easily, implement first a good data-driven animation system.