create simple walking man

What are you starting off with? How detailed and complex does it have to be? You may want something like Poser.

roblogon wrote:

… I'm probably wrong in thinking that this kind of animations are possible in a simple way with apple motion

when you look closer to your linked demo, you'll notice the 'art' behind this on-first-sight 'simple' animation:

e.g. the legs bend, the figure has a weight etc etc.

here's a good explaination, what a good animation is:

http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html

… explaining things as weight, arc, slow-in/-out, etc

understanding that principles, the choice of weapon is yours: painting that stick-man by hand and loop the cells, using designated animation apps as ToonBoom or trying to accomplish the effects in M5 - I dare to say, a M5-animated figure, although you have tons of 'behaviors' to choose, is never as 'smooth' as a hand drawn.

her's another advice on a walking cycle

http://www.animatorisland.com/?p=206

Here's a sample Motion project with a "jogging stick figure". It's a starting point...

You might have to manually animate pieces to make it more convincing, I used oscillate behaviors.

It's exceptionally basic, just to illustrate how you might try to get it done in Motion. The "secret" is in grouping the objects in hierarchies. Something like this:

all the leg parts a placed in a top level group (call it Leg). Place an oscillate behavior on the group [You will need to set anchor points for the pivots of the groups.] The next group down would be "Lower Leg" -- it will contain the "shin" and foot. The Lower Leg *group* will get an oscillator and then the foot, at the end of the chain, gets another oscillate behavior. Then you've got to figure out the "timing" of the behaviors to synchronize them... (have fun!)

I recommend setting up *one cycle* (marked with in/out points) then cloning. Then duplicate the clones, set the timing to Loop then offset the start of one clone 1/2 cycle off the other and stretch them out for the length you need. (I didn't set this up this project this way, but I did do a clone for the duplicate/offset motion.) There's some latitude in how you handle this (for instance, you can rotate the left/right groups to create the alternating animation.) ... groups and anchor points -- lengths and joints...

http://sight-creations.com/fxexchange/jogging_stick_figure.zip

No problem. If you do a lot of cartoon animations, you might want to look into Anime Studio Pro (http://anime.smithmicro.com/). It uses a "bone" concept and automatically animates vector shapes to conform to them. The reason I recommend the Pro version is because it will allow you to create animations for larger than 480 SD (plus a bunch of other really nice features, like Physics. And, I think it already has the walking/running animation setups available.)