CAGD 493 - Christopher Coombs's Senior Portfolio

     Hello everyone! This is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to my weekly blog! On Wednesday of this week, I had the privilege of presenting my overall progress on the quadruped walk and run cycles. In the previous week, I believed I had completed the walk cycle and was ready to move forward with the next movements for my character. However, after hearing some new advice from the professor and a few other students regarding my walk cycle, I decided to give it one last touch-up this week. The most important thing I needed to fix was the position of the legs. In the previous version below, the leopard would lift up its front and rear paws around the same time, which in the real world would likely cause the leopard to fall over.       It took quite a bit of time to fix, considering I had to readjust the leg positions and various parts of the front portion of the body for every keyframe I made. I also adjusted the shoulders to stand out a little more,...

     Welcome back to my blog, everyone! This is Christopher Coombs, and thanks to the suggestions of the class as well as the professor in the previous week, I've made quite a lot of improvements to the walk cycle. Here is the progress that I have made on the walk cycle for this week:     While there are certainly some very small areas I'll probably go back and iron out with the tail movement and the timing of the back legs, I think my first quadruped animation is pretty much done. Therefore, what I decided to focus the rest of my week on was continuing the leopard's run cycle. While I wasn't able to find many references online of leopards running, I did find a really cool cheetah reference that assisted a lot with the blockout I made last week for the run cycle.     This week's focus for the leopard run was to move on to splining the animation, looking for inconsistencies between frames, and adjusting the timing. Here is version one of the leopard run...

     Hey everyone, it's Christopher! I want to thank all of my classmates for the great advice I received during the Wednesday evaluation of my very first walk cycle. Here is the progress that I have made so far on the leopard rig early this morning:     As you can now tell , I managed to easily fix the problem I had with the tail during the presentation, and I lowered the body a bit to make it look more like they were sneaking. I've slowed down the walk just a touch, too, and reduced the tail sway, although these might not be too noticeable. I took Mark's advice from that day and lowered the leopard's head just like in the reference footage. As for today, I decided it'd be best to swing by Mark's office hours and see if there was any other way I could improve my animation. Fortunately, he suggested a lot of cool ideas. In the reference footage he showed me, as well as his tiger walk cycle animation, he noted that the front paws will typically extend forward rou...

    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...