CAGD 493 - Christopher Coombs's Senior Portfolio

    Hello, this is Christopher Coombs,  and welcome back to my weekly blog! This week, I've decided to deviate a bit from working on my routine quadruped animations. Poetically, my laptop was also tired of working with the leopard rig, and it actually broke down just one day after reanimating my last leopard animation. After finally getting the new laptop delivered and set up for my classes during the latter half of this week, I started looking for something new to animate. Not only did I want my next project to be a brief respite from the many weeks spent animating nothing but quadrupeds, but I also wanted to experiment with the concept of weight. Therefore, I was on the hunt for a character that looked heavy. Fortunately, it didn't take long to find something really cool:      My goal for this week was to get this heavy machine to do a walk cycle. Finding references from the original Star Wars trilogy was pretty difficult, as the AT-STs were either too cl...

      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...

     Greetings, everyone! Welcome back to the seventh iteration of my weekly blog posts. In the previous reflection, I made some final touch-ups on my first quadruped run and got started on a more complicated idle animation. I managed to get it out of its blockout phase, and this was the end result of the previous week:           Since then, I've made various tweaks to the animation in an effort to reduce the stiffness of the previous version. Here is what I managed to accomplish by the end of this week:      One of the most noticeable changes in the animation, aside from experimenting with multiple camera angles through the sequencer, was fixing the gross head movement issue from the previous version. Whenever I tried animating the head for the wake-up, it would do this weird side rotation before whipping into the spot it needed to be in. When I managed to iron out that issue, all the other keyframes for the head controller de...

     Hello, and welcome back to my blog, everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and this is a reflection on my sixth week of working with quadrupeds. For my quadruped run cycle, I have only a minor update on my overall progress. I think the leopard's motion is looking pretty good now. I made a few minor adjustments to the animation. This is what it currently looks like:      I fixed the issue with the shoulders, and gave them a bit more of an offset, though it's not super noticable. Using the motion trail tool, I was able to give the head more of a natural bounce. I've also separated the back legs just a bit more. Lastly, I spread out the toes for the front and back paws upon making contact with the ground, to add a bit of a squash effect. As for the latter half of the week, I've been working on completing my blockout for an idle animation. Rather than creating a stale game cycle where it just stands there doing nothing, I decided to push the idea a littl...