Week 6: Animated Spin Kick

 This week, I decided to take a small break from my animation to review the basics in animation. I went about this by choosing to animate a quick single spin kick with the rig Delta, provided by Agora. The rig was well made so there was little issue in figuring out the controllers or quirks of the rig.

As for the reference used for this animation, I chose this following clip since it also does a break down of the kick as a part of the tutorial. It helped me identify and block out the necessary poses for this animation. When animated poses from step 1 and 2, there is a slight slide between poses which I hope to fix this upcoming week.

I chose to experiment with FK arms and IK legs to achieve the kick and ran into some extra rotation of the neck and ankles. I used the elude filter to help me fit those issues and added some extra keyframes between poses that needed it to avoid snapping certain joints.

Overall, I feel that the poses are accurate to my reference. I do feel that I need to adjust the timing and some translations on the kick a bit more to really get the feel of a fast and heavy kick. I think this could be fixed with moving some keyframes and adding holds between the anticipation pose and the final blow. I'll likely add a settle pose afterwards as well.

Here's the video to view it with a slower playback speed.