CAGD 493 Week 7 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

    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 decided to follow suit and break in far more extreme ways than the previous one. I ended up having to scrap the head animation and re-key everything on two separate occasions, as it broke a second time after a subsequent crash. It did help me figure out what was going on, though. For whatever reason, the coordinate numbers would change, and the turns would wind up in hundreds or even thousands of degrees in some cases. Even frames I keyed that were zeroed out weren't safe from this. Speaking more on animating the head, after fixing it for the second time, I tweaked it so that after waking up, the leopard would subtly dart its head, scanning the room. I also made it so that the ears gradually perk up. Changing the camera angle for this part was also important, as I didn't want the leopard to be looking directly into the camera at the audience. Another part of the head that I worked on was pushing the yawn pose further

 The tail also received some attention this week. I changed the timing of its initial movement and also gave it some drag. I've also adjusted its timing for the end section, but I'm still not satisfied with the last half. It's definitely something that I want to iron out more tonight and tomorrow. For the hip and chest controllers, I played around with the squash and stretch a bit more. I also ensured that the hips, when rotating to stand up, would translate in the direction of the rotation. Even so, I feel like it needs something more for it to look natural. Perhaps I could offset the chest controller to make them rise before the hips do. I worked a bit on the paws as well, giving the back ones some lift in the middle so that they are stepping rather than sliding forward. As of writing this post, I've also fixed how the back paws slide on the x-axis after standing all the way up, although this change is not currently visible in the video. I tweaked the movement on the front right paw and adjusted its timing as well to make it feel smoother. One last thing I've been experimenting with this week was these spherical nurb controllers:


My idea was to use these controllers to animate the torso and make it look like the leopard was breathing. The problem, however, is that the keyframes won't show up on the timeline or graph editor, so I'm unable to make adjustments to the timing and translation. 

Update: I managed to change the timing of the entire animation just before midnight. Now the leopard gets up using its front legs first before using its back ones. This is how the animation looks now:


That's all for now! Thank you for checking in on my progress. Hopefully, next week's critiques will provide me with some great advice, as always.
                                                                                                                                  - Christopher Coombs                 

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