CAGD 493 week 5

 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 bit to out of place for me right now, I have then tried to improve the blocking stage and here is what I came up with: 

I knew that in the first try, the movement was too slow, but now I think it is too fast and the jumps still look a little bit out of place. I find it very challenging to create such an unnatural movement - that couldn't really be done in the same way in real life. 

I have splined the animation just to see how the movement feels at this stage - I know I still have a lot to work on considering the timing: 

The jumps look very unnatural - I think I need to make the time in the air longer and then the part when the dog is about to touch the ground, faster because it needs to work well with gravity. I think I have it switched around  - where it jumps quickly but falls down slowly, this is something for me to look more in depth at.