CAGD 493 Week 1 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

   
    Welcome to my blog, everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and this is the very beginning of my weekly blogs for Senior Portfolio (CAGD 495). My specialization is animation, and this semester I really want to buckle in and dedicate more of my time to refining my animation skills. Unfortunately, I didn't animate as much over the summer as I wished I had, so I came into the semester quite rusty. The Advanced Production class's animation evaluation assignment from this week definitely shook most of that rust off, however. It was an extremely challenging and mentally taxing assignment, so I dedicated nearly all of my time and energy to it this week. Even so, I did set out some time to plan what I wanted to animate for this class. One thing that piqued my interest immensely was working on some quadrupedal rigs. At this point, I'm far too accustomed to animating humans, and I found a lot of interesting creature rigs online this week that could give me a new challenge to work with and be quite fun to animate as well. 


Here are some of the rigs that have piqued my interest:




Each rig above has its own unique shape and theme, which allows me to experiment with the style of how these characters would move.
For the time being, I'm interested in animating some game cycle animations for these characters, such as:
  • A walk and run cycle
  • Two attacks
  • At least one misc action (flying, swimming, idle, etc.) 

 The tiger rig is quite realistic and has plenty of reference footage to study involving its movement, so it'll be the first character I'll attempt to animate. If this preliminary animation goes well, I have the cartoonish dog with the large, clumsy paws, the fantasy dragon, or the sci-fi creature to choose from next, among many other potential rigs online. Ideally, I'd like to finish the block-outs for the tiger by next week and finish the animations by the week after. If I manage to complete this task sooner than anticipated, I'll move on to the next creature. Most of these creatures should take roughly 2 weeks at maximum to complete their cycles. Although I anticipate animating the dragon could perhaps take a little longer, I'll worry about crossing that bridge once I get to it. After I'm done working with a few quadrupeds, I'd like to move on to practicing lip sync and facial expression for characters.

    That's all for now, but I'll be sure to keep all of you posted on my progress for next week!

                                                                                                                                 - Christopher Coombs




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAGD 493 Week 2 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

Image
    Welcome back, everyone! This is my Week 2 update for Senior Portfolio (CAGD 495). As noted in the previous week, I'm very fascinated with learning how to animate quadrupeds. Given the large abundance of awesome-looking creature rigs online, I've had the opportunity to break away from my comfort zone of animating only humans. Many of these rigs have themes rooted in fiction, but for my first attempt, I decided to choose a rig based on a real animal. Initially, it was going to be CGSpectrum's free tiger rig, as I thought it looked pretty cool. I was also quite fortunate to find plenty of reference footage for the tiger and some really cool animation diagrams for animating big cats, as shown below:      However, despite my preparedness, I encountered a myriad of issues along the way that had impeded my progress too many times to count. CGSpectrum's download link for the tiger rig no longer worked, but I still had access to the rig from my previous class with Ma...
Read more

CAGD 493 Week 15 FinalReflection - Christopher Coombs

Image
      Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and we have reached the end of the Fall 2025  semester. This final blog will serve as a reflection of all my progress up until this point. Here is the demo reel that I've prepared showing all five animations I've worked on this year:     At the start of the semester, my initial goal was to study the movement of quadrupeds and get good at animating them. The quadruped I decided to start with was a leopard, as shown in the first three animations of my demo reel. Although it took a considerable amount of time and effort to learn the fundamental mechanics of how quadrupeds move, I couldn't have figured it out without the feedback I received from the professor and my classmates. While studying the reference footage I had gathered online, this feedback became crucial in identifying the most significant traits in how quadrupeds generally move.  In a quadrupedal walk cycle, the front and back legs can be ima...
Read more

CAGD 493 Week 8 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

Image
      This is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to my blog, concluding my eighth week of quadruped studies. On Wednesday, I had the privilege of presenting my progress on my latest animation with the leopard rig. Here is roughly what it looked like at the time of presentation:     The final result was pretty rough. However, due to the numerous errors I've made in the process of creating this particular animation,  I learned a very valuable lesson this week. When animating any character, it's crucial to create full poses for the rig rather than moving parts of it. My video above is the antithesis of this idea. You can clearly see how small fragments of the body move independently from each other, one at a time, like falling dominoes. Meanwhile, most of the body remains static, which is the primary reason the animation feels so stiff. I believe this all started with me trying to offset the chest and hip controllers so that the leopard would sit up with its...
Read more