Daria Pieczyńska

 This week, I have picked up where I left with my new corgi animation. I started with just the two frames planned out, the frame of the dog standing up and a frame with the dog collapsed. I started by adding the last frame and an inbetween of the dog falling.  I wanted to put in the most important fames first, before moving forward into making the dog more expressive. I noticed that actually in the frames that the dog is laying down, hos paws aren't fully touching the ground, so I needed to fix that.  The one thing that really caused me problems was trying to get the dog's head laying on the ground. In my reference, the dog landed with their head fully touching the ground, but this rig was definitely limiting me in that area. I had to really play around with some controls to achieve a pose that would be close enough to what I wanted to get.  The GIF above is still in stepped, it made me realize how quickly the dog's head jumps back up and how big of a difference it made. I

 This week, I have focused on finalizing the dog happy walk cycle. In class, I have gotten very valuable feedback on what I could improve to make the animation look better. I ended up extending the back legs further to make the jump more believable, adding a little bit of floppiness to the ears and making the dog's eyes blink. Here is the final animation in a form of gifs:  I'm very happy with how it turned out, I think it's very cartoony and that was my goal for this task. Because I really liked working with this rig and making the animation very fun and light-hearted - I liked the aspect of adding personality to a quadruped character and not only focusing on the body mechanics, I thought of exploring the possibilities of the rig more. I decided on making a short 20 frame animation of the dog collapsing from tiredness.  I found this reference, which I loved:  Because it's a gif, I could lay all the frames out to help me with the timing of the fall.  I decided to move p

This week, I have focused on completing the dog  happy walk cycle. At the stage where I have finished last week, I knew I wanted to fix the rotation on the head and ad more side to side movement in the head and in the body.  I started with adding rotation on the Z axis on the head.  After this step, I could see the head was still moving very abruptly and I did not like that. I decided to add a locator on the dog's nose and constrain it to the head to see the motion trail the head nose creates.  From this motion trail, I could easily see why the movement didn't look smooth, there was a little glitch in the motion that made the movement look a little rigid.  I fixed the head rotations so the motion trail would look like this, and the movement became a lot smoother. What I still didn't like was the timing of the head rotations, which I have fixed in the graph editor.  When I playblasted this video, I still did not like something about the movement, and what I decided that I di

 This week I have focused on exploring the dog run happy run cycle more. I started by implementing feedback I got last week from the class.  It has been brought to my attention, that I need an offset between the front and back legs of the dog. The front legs are leading the motion, so they would jump first making the back legs follow.  I added an offset of a couple frames on the back legs and the back spine control, however then my final frame and my first frame didn't align.  There was a little bit of a glitch happening because of the frames not lining up correctly, so my next step was working on that.   Here, the motion looks a lot smoother, so I decided to apply more feedback I got in class this week. It was pointed out to me that one of the back paws doesn't really touch the ground, it only brushes against it. Now me seeing it, I decided to fix it, by creating a frame where the paw is fully touching the ground.  It definitely helped the animation to look better. Next, I add