Daria Pieczyńska

 This week, I have started working on animating the dog walk cycle, but before doing so, I needed to organize the rig, because this rig has a lot of controls which make the work very confusing. I have created 4 extra layers where I have grouped many controls which I don't need to use right now - facial, tail etc.  After organizing the file, I have looked into reference for this specific run / walk I had in mind. Because I want it to be very cartoony, and not realistic, I looked into GIFs of happy dogs. I found this specific video on Vimeo, which looks like something I wanted to create :  https://vimeo.com/190045963 After very closely looking into this video, I started blocking out the poses in Maya with the corgi rig. For now I am moving only the COG and the paws. I will adjust any overlap. head movements and tail later on in the process. After blocking it out I still could see a lot of things about I didn't like about the paws and about the jumps. The jumps look a little...

 This week I have focused on fixing the elements of the tiger walk cycle, that I did not like. I got some critiques that the head of the tiger is moving too much and I completely agreed with that. I thought the head not only looked like it was hitting a wall, but also was moving way too much compared to the reference video. At first, I wanted to fix the keyframes that I have already put in to make the movement more gentle and less visible, but it was quite problematic, because I accidentally out rotations on a few different controls and because of that, it was hard to decide where were the rotations what caused the issues.  Because I struggled to put the head in a neutral position due to all the rotations, I decided to completely delete all the rotations from both the shoulders and neck - so all rotations that could possibly affect the head.  With all the paw movements and hip movements that I was happy with, I started working on the head "from scratch". I decided to move...

 This week I focused on creating a tiger walk cycle just from a video reference - without looking at the practice file or poses.  The first thing I needed to look at was what I can do with the rig so it stops breaking all the time, because as I have explained in the pervious post, I have had many issues with the tiger rig and animating with a rig that works like this, is almost impossible. I did a lot of troubleshooting and ended up changing the evaluation mode in Maya from Parallel to DG. This switch definitely helped with using the rig, as it stopped breaking, like it did before.  Then I looked at a video reference of a tiger walking:  To get a better idea of how which frame is which pose, I moved the video to SyncSketch and changed the framerate to 24fmp. Then I chose a snippet to base my animation off of and looped only that part in SyncSketch.  Then mostly working in side and perspective views I started animating the walk in Maya. I prefer to animate with r...

 This week I have worked on creating a tiger walk cycle. My plan was to copy the poses from the example to make my own walk cycle, however I ended up needing to practically copy the values of the animated tiger to make this walk cycle work. Not because I was unable to animate from observation, but because the rig was constantly breaking for me.   The rig would break on me in a very weird way - and I needed to start over the walk cycle multiple times (at least 5). After creating a pose and setting a key the rig would do this:  The character would go back to the pose I chose for it, if I slightly moved the controls, however once I set a key it would again look crazy.  Because of this issue, I needed to restart my work quite a lot of time and it took me a long time to actually be able to animate with this rig. It took patience of going back and fixing what have been happening - I am not sure if it was a problem of the rig or of the file, but restarting the file or ...