For this assignment, we were give given instructions to create and enhance our methods of animation. The criteria contains a walk cycle, run cycle and a body mechanic of our own choice, which can be any motion of expression. We were also given the option to either animate them in 2D, 3D or both.
Before I began anything, I researched which unique motion and rigs I would use, by looking through videos and gifs and found these: (note, the push-up reference is a gif but the website doesn’t allow it to play)
These rigs below are ones I found on the Internet, and the ones circled are the ones I will use. Tina for walking, Jill for running and Dex for push-ups.
After finding the preferred rigs and references I wanted, I dove into the process of rigging the animation. I organised my animations from most simple to make to the more complicated, in my opinion at least; Walking > Push-ups > Running. To give an overall explain of each process, I placed my references on one side of the screen and tried to emulate them as best as I can, all the while using the anchor and FKIK techniques for all.
As the weeks of the term went, progress went on fairly smoothly, but as mentioned in my 3D Environment blog, unforeseen circumstances happened, I discovered that my USB stick had been corrupted. This meant I lost half of my term 1 works, but my rigging suffered the least damage. But unfortunately, my other work did and had to push this assignment to the side and prioritize the other to catch up.
It wasn’t up to near Christmas I was fully able to focus all my energy on this assignment and manage to complete it by the deadline.
In a short conclusion, despite pushing this on a back-burner, I did overall the process of rigging these animation. Where I did feel like I could’ve done better, it was a great practise on to rig properly for future projects. Kind of like a double edged sword.