I haven’t touched this for a few weeks, so here’s an update.
I’ve been trying to handle rigging, animating and even a little modelling all at the same time which hasn’t opposed too much of a problem so far, but I know it’s going to become a bit overwhelming soon. The character I showed in my first post (named ‘Marv’) is currently being worked into game. I’ve made roughly 20-something animations for Marv which include, running, walking, jumping gaps, various climbs, and drops. I’ve put that on hold for an extremely short time to work on my other thing which requires me rigging at least one character.
The character I am rigging is a Mother Seal/Polar Bear thing made by Robert Christian (fellow student). I really should ask him for an exact definition of what this is… but it looks cool, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Model by Robert Christian, larger picture:
http://i47.tinypic.com/rclezr.png
His WIP polycount thread can be found here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97941
Rigging progress.
Larger picture:
http://i45.tinypic.com/dmsln4.png
The rigging itself has been going okay. I ran into a problem with Ik/Fk switching of the arms and finally fixed it after 4 attempts which took me about 3 or 4 hours. I am an animator, not a rigger, so this portion of the work is dealing heavy damage to me greatly lol. I have also changed the knee rolling/aiming into SDK’s rather than moving a knee control around. I still have to add dynamic joints for the lower area of the coat. I will use SDK+bone rigs for the arms and hoodie.
As for my animation side of things, it’s been going fairly smoothly. Most basic movements are down except for a few which include crouch travelling and idle-to-climbing ones. I am working with Conan Bourke who is a programming teacher at the college. I have to make a bunch of animation sets with some requirements while he puts it all into engine/game/not exactly sure what he’s doing with them… but he’s doing the animation blending so it should be engine.
This is my run cycle. The problem I’m having at the moment is not knowing what needs to be fixed but knowing it can still be better. Which I can imagine most artists in this field of 3D in general face all the time. Rather than pondering forever on what needs to be fixed I’ve left it at a level in which I think is okay so I can work on other animations. I’d rather have 20+ animations of acceptable level rather than spending two weeks on a single run loop since I think I’m the only animator doing this and Marv won’t magically move himself.
The run actually goes for 20 frames, but I have looped it for 10 seconds for the purpose of this update.
As much as I want to show every single animation I’ve done, that would be unreasonable in terms of blog updating and the attention span of the average person, so I’m going to leave it at that.
/feedback is appreciated.
Keo's Animation Blog 
