Final Show Reel

Finished dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfyV484JePo

Rendered out ready to be put into the show reel.

Motion trails and bouncing balls

I'm using motion trails to smooth out the movement of the feet.

And for getting the ball bouncing with a nice curve.

Squash and stretch

Parenting the ball to the dogs head, then animating the switch on when he catches it, so the ball isn't permanently stuck to his mouth. 

Using grease pencil to get the tail movement down.

And afterwards, putting an expression on the face with the eyebrows.

Lesson learnt

Remember to keep files on more than one system and backup more frequently, especially when the soul files are on a mobile device.

I lost 2 days of animation, thankfully I have an online backup that automatically backs up else it would've been a lot worse and I had the report outline on my U drive in uni.

I've caught up with the animation and just need to upload my progress on here, put them all together on a showreel and start fleshing out my report.

Dog playing fetch work so far

Getting reference from Youtube and sketching out some poses to get a general feel for it.

 

 

 

So I baked the run cycle for just under 200 frames and added the grabbing the ball and stopping.

Next I'll animate the ball bounce and improve and tweak the stopping animation some more.

Dog run

And the running part of this animation is done. Can't believe how long that took. I had an animator friend help critic it all the way and it's become so much better than before and has been a learning curve for not only animating the run cycle but also the work flow.

Redid the dog run kinda

So the run didn't look quite right and the graph editor was all over the place. So not only did I remove keys that wasn't needed, but adjusted the legs to match and be offset.

Here's the graph editor of before and after looking at one paw.

And where I am currently.