Creating Russian Soldier March Walk Cycle

Hello everybody, I am now working on my second walk cycle for class.  I decided to do a soldier march and with the help of my teacher, we picked a Russian Soldier March.  I started to look around for a free rigged model that I could use and found a cool robot and gave it another free rifle model that I found to hold.  I found the free rig on http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/?filters%5Bdownloads-character-rigs%5D%5Bdisplay%5D=list&page=3&per_page=20 and the rifle on http://thefree3dmodels.com/stuff/  Here is the rig and rifle.  Thank you Niklas Wennersten and 3dregenerator for providing the excellent models.

I am using this video for reference.

Okay, so first I picked a portion of the video I wanted to do.  I tried to see if I could emulate the 15-17 second portion of the march and will try to see if I can cycle it.  Here is a picture of the initial pose that I put my robot in.

I have now blocked out the first pass of my animation.  Here is what it looks like so far.  I will try to tweak it as I go along and get feedback from other people.



Okay, so I just spent about another 2 hours on it and I am starting to get it to look more like the march in the video.  Match the timing of the march in the video is probably the hardest.  I still need to fix the leg slide.  I will try to figure it out.  But here are the differences that I made.  I wish I knew how to use the graph editor more; it seems useful.



 Once I started looking at the animation along with the video with my friend Chris, I realized that there was much that I had to fix.  I spent another 4 hours today on it.  Here is where it is at for the moment.  It it getting more accurate to the video, but he seems to be marching really really fast.  I need to fix that.



 

Here is the current condition of my march.  I know its not perfect, but I feel like I was getting a better feel of the march at the end.  If I have more time I will try to perfect it later.  Here are 3 Playblasts and the final render.