Hello again! My name is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to my blog! The end of the year is approaching, and my work is coming to a close. This current animation is more than likely my final one for the semester. In the previous week, I decided to work section by section, since this was one of my longer animations. My goal for that week was to finish the AT-ST's turnaround animation. Here was the result of that previous week's work:
Although it needs just a bit more refinement, it wasn't half bad, being that it was my first biped turnaround. For this week's goal, I was primarily focused on pushing all tangents into spline and retiming the entire animation. I also took the time to refine some areas and even weave a few new small animations into the scene. Here is what I have accomplished by the end of this week:
At first glance, the most noticable change between these animations is how I incorporated my camera angles. I decided that if I wanted to hyperbolize the size difference between these two characters, I would need more exaggerated camera angles. Therefore, I sacrificed the single continuous shot for some new ones. The animation process went very well, and I was able to fix a lot of problems with Wall-E. At the beginning, he was looking pretty stiff, so I added some head movement. This far better emphasized how unaware Wall-E was moments before colliding with the AT-ST. As for the collision, the challenge I encountered was primarily due to Wall-E's unique, mostly inflexible geometry. Lifting up the body from Wall-E's tank treads and having the trash cube wedge open his internal compartments allowed Wall-E just enough wrap-around to sell the impact of the crash. As the AT-ST slowly turned around, I made Wall-E back up slowly and get thrown into the air with every stomp.
After all this, I splined out the remaining half of Wall-E's animation and significantly sped up the timing for the getaway so that it looked like Wall-E was peeling out. Splining this part of the animation helped majorly in getting rid of unnecessary keyframes that threw off its initial movements. Speaking more on the movements in this part, I wanted to emphasize the sudden, sharp turn by tilting the body and lifting up one of his tank treads as if he were about to lose balance. Of course, there is plenty more I want to refine with Wall-E's animation, as I see quite a few areas that need to lose their stiffness, especially in the arms. I might also do a bit more retiming for the impact and the moments Wall-E gets launched into the air. This will be next week's goal. As for the AT-ST animation, a large portion of the work this week was resyncing the timing to Wall-E's. However, I also adjusted a few things, such as lowering the height of each heavy step and adding a deploy animation for the AT-ST's guns the moment they point down at Wall-E. I also animated the barrels to look like they were firing during the runaway sequence. It's subtle and a little difficult to see because of the distance from the camera. However, I think that adding a projectile could help show this far better, so I'm thinking of modeling one around the start of next week and playing around with the emissives.
That's all for now! Thank you, as always, for checking in on my progress. I'll be sure to keep you up to date on the progress of this animation as our time together soon comes to an end.
Welcome back, everyone! This is my Week 2 update for Senior Portfolio (CAGD 495). As noted in the previous week, I'm very fascinated with learning how to animate quadrupeds. Given the large abundance of awesome-looking creature rigs online, I've had the opportunity to break away from my comfort zone of animating only humans. Many of these rigs have themes rooted in fiction, but for my first attempt, I decided to choose a rig based on a real animal. Initially, it was going to be CGSpectrum's free tiger rig, as I thought it looked pretty cool. I was also quite fortunate to find plenty of reference footage for the tiger and some really cool animation diagrams for animating big cats, as shown below: However, despite my preparedness, I encountered a myriad of issues along the way that had impeded my progress too many times to count. CGSpectrum's download link for the tiger rig no longer worked, but I still had access to the rig from my previous class with Ma...
Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and we have reached the end of the Fall 2025 semester. This final blog will serve as a reflection of all my progress up until this point. Here is the demo reel that I've prepared showing all five animations I've worked on this year: At the start of the semester, my initial goal was to study the movement of quadrupeds and get good at animating them. The quadruped I decided to start with was a leopard, as shown in the first three animations of my demo reel. Although it took a considerable amount of time and effort to learn the fundamental mechanics of how quadrupeds move, I couldn't have figured it out without the feedback I received from the professor and my classmates. While studying the reference footage I had gathered online, this feedback became crucial in identifying the most significant traits in how quadrupeds generally move. In a quadrupedal walk cycle, the front and back legs can be ima...
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...
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