Week 7: New Poses and Spline

For Senior Portfolio, I continued working on the dog animation from the last couple of weeks. I worked on blocking some additional poses, refining old poses, and experimenting with a few potential movements before splining the blocked key frames.

Checking in with the progress from last week, I researched some references for a 'begging' motion on Google to figure out the position of the back legs and lower back. The reference helped me achieve a more realistic pose. The last few things that need adjustments in this pose are the front paws as they look too stiff at the moment. The IK controllers that I'm using currently make it difficult to achieve a clean arch so I'll be testing out some keyframe switches between IK and FK to achieve this.

After adding the new poses, I went ahead and splined the animation while applying the euler filter on the curves to avoid any weird rotations. The animation still needs some clean up (i.e. sliding paws, longer holds, fixed timing, etc), but I like the way it reads now. While screen recording the animation, I realized that adding in a human biped to act as the owner would add a nice touch to the final animation. I'll be adding the new biped this coming week.

In the clip, I realized that the elbow controllers during the idle pose need some additional adjustment as they semi-collapse into the chest at the 3/4th view. This will also be addressed this coming week.

As mentioned above, I did experiment with some additional poses for this animation again. To wrap up the animation, I was hoping to add a belly-up pose. I tried a similar process to when I tested out the spin trick. When rotating the COG controller 180 degrees, the body mesh broke, leading to holes where the legs are positioned. Additionally, the eyes also faced some issues as they turned cross-eyed.

As a stretch goal for this project, I'd like to add another pose where the two rigs interact as the person leans down to pet the dog after the down pose. For now, I'll continue working on this by adjusting poses and adding in a human biped to complete the scene.