CAGD 493 Week 4 Reflection - Christopher Coombs


    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 that I had completed around Thursday:

One thing that you might notice with this early version is that while the key poses are alright, the whole animation feels like it's lacking weight. This is something I tried to remedy today by raising and lowering the hips and chest more, as seen in version two:

I've also readjusted the time and increased the speed a touch, since I thought the animation went way too slow when extending the limbs. It still feels stiff, and I'd like to know how I could add more weight to the running as well. I'm not sure how to proceed as of right now. Hopefully, next week I will get the opportunity to present again and receive more wonderful feedback for the run like I did for the walk. Lastly, I decided to start a blockout for the idle pose tonight. I'm going to do the same for the attack animation starting next week. 


That's all for now! Thank you for seeing the progress I've made on the walk and run animation this week! 
                                                                                                                   - Christopher Coombs







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