CAGD 493 Week 5 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

    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, although it might not be too noticable. The end result of these changes led to a far more balanced character. Here is the final result:

    If there was one more thing I'd want to change with this animation, it'd be turning the front paws more inward. Unfortunately, this was about as far inward as they could go without breaking the entire rig. Regardless, I've spent enough time on this animation, and I need to start moving on to the other animation cycles now. Speaking of which, as for my other animation, I've invested the majority of my time this week into refining the leopard's run cycle. Here is what the animation looked like at the very beginning of the week, just before the critiques: 

    While I had a good general idea of the key poses required for the movement, the whole animation was lacking in many ways. I really needed to push those poses further and figure out how I was going to distribute the character's weight better. Fortunately for me, I had received some great feedback this Wednesday for the animation. The most helpful advice I was given for animating this run cycle was when Mark, our professor, asked me to imagine the hip and chest controllers as two ends of an accordion. And in a similar motion to an accordion, these controllers need to squash and stretch during the run. At the time, I only had them going up and down, but after applying this new concept, it made a huge difference. Mark sent me some fantastic reference footage for the run cycle, which showed how far I could push the movement of my leopard, especially with his legs.

Here is what my leopard animation looks like now, following all the amazing feedback.:

    As you can tell, I've ironed out many issues from  the previous iteration. Mark said that my animation could be accomplished in just 15 frames, so I set out to reduce the three additional frames I had by increasing the speed of the run, especially in the back legs, since those moved too sluggishly. In line with the reference I was given, I added more compression between the leopard's hip and chest controllers. I also made the front and back paws cross each other as far as they possibly could go without breaking the rig. 

    One of the students, Keaton, also provided me with some excellent advice. Until this week, I hadn't experimented with motion trails. He showed me how useful they could be in creating natural character movements.

    

    Not only was this an incredibly effective way of rounding out the jagged edges in the motions of my character's leg, but it made the motion from the hip and chest controllers feel more natural. Areas in which I'd like to readjust more in the coming week would be the head, shoulders, and tail. The chest was the primary reason my character's head was bobbing in such a silly way from the previous iteration. I managed to remedy this by animating the neck to keep the head mostly stabilized. I'm also proud of the slight dragging motion I added to the ears. However, I realized upon viewing more reference footage that, unlike cheetahs, leopards bob their heads just a little more when running. I applied that knowledge to my animation, but something about it still feels off to me, so it's definitely something I'll experiment more with, perhaps by using motion trails. The shoulders were another part of the animation I started working with. The problem I've just noticed with them, as I was writing this blog, is that they both are going up and down at the same time. If there is an offset in distance between the front legs, then I need to create an offset in time for the shoulders. Lastly, the tail. I managed to give it a bit of drag, but there's still something about it that doesn't feel natural. I haven't exactly nailed what it is yet, but I'll play around with it more until I figure it out. Other than fixing all of these issues, most of next week will be dedicated to gathering reference footage and starting some blockouts for the attack cycles and the idle state.

 

    That's all for now! I'll keep you updated on my progress for next week! 

                                                                                                                                   - Christopher Coombs