CAGD 493 week 7

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 didn't like, was that a lot was happening all at once and because of that, my brain gets a little confused. Some of the movements still looked a little sharp and I knew I needed more cushioning in the movements. 

I have slowed down the tail wagging and made the head movements a little more gentle. 

I have also added some body movements, since the dog would be changing the balance of its weight during the run. 

I was quite happy with the body movement at this point, so I moved onto giving the dog more personality. 

I made the dog smile and I took his tongue out and made it bounce when the dog is jumping.