CAGD 493 Week 8 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

 

    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 front legs before standing all the way. As much as I wanted to fix the errors I've made, I was dealing with a nightmare of keyframe spaghetti. The whole animation was loosely held together with sticks. Therefore, I decided to start over entirely from scratch, which took many, many more hours than I had expected it to. Here is what I've come up with so far on my second attempt:

    One thing you might notice right off the bat is that I finally managed to add some breathing into the animation. Although the nurb spherical controllers still wouldn't appear on the timeline, I found an alternative method. The channel box for the chest controller had a scaling option that I could play around with to simulate breathing. It didn't look very good from most angles, so I had to readjust the cameras a bit to get it just right. Another aspect of the character I wanted to bring to life more, compared to the previous iteration, was the leopard's tail. I got it looking far less static in the latter half, actually contributing to the stretches now, although there are definitely some areas I'd like to tweak later. Speaking of which, for the initial stretch, I reanimated it so that the leopard would crawl forward, then slide down into its pose, as it felt more natural. It also gave me the opportunity to take the leopard's chest controller even lower, which matched many of the references I've seen online. I let the leopard's paws point upwards and splay apart at the lowest point of this pose. As for the yawn during this stretch, a student during the peer review wanted to see how far I could push this expression. In this version, I stretched the mouth further open, enough to see the leopard's molars. Although I believe I did way better on this one as compared to the previous version, there are still a few issues I need to tend to. The main one bothering me right now is the shoulders at the beginning. For whatever reason, the mesh in between the two shoulder controllers extrudes outwards when the head lifts up in the beginning pose. Another thing I want to tweak is the last four steps the leopard takes at the end of the animation to reposition itself. While I believe I did a much better job at animating in poses rather than solitary movements, it didn't always feel so easy, and that definitely shows in the legs at the end. 

    Starting next week, I'll see what I can do to remedy these issues. After this, I think it's time for me to move on to something new. I never expected it to take so long to finish these game cycles. Then again, this was my very first time working with a quadruped rig. Although animating this leopard was fun, I know that spending too much time on it will leave me with significantly less time to work with newer rigs before the semester ends. As for my next project, I haven't decided what I want to do just yet. I have plenty of different quadrupedal rigs to choose from, assuming I want to work with a new animal. However, I could also always try animating something entirely different. 

Thanks for checking in on my progress this week! As always, I'll keep you up to date on what I choose for my next project.

                                                                                                                             - Christopher Coombs