Day 2

Well I kept some momentum from yesterday! Woot....
I was hoping to get a bit more done today, but work called and I was away for a bit longer than I wanted to be.
On the plus side I did get a run cycle almost finished. Hoping tomorrow I will be able to sit down and really polish up what I did yesterday and today. 2 days of actually animating stuff in a row, has got me pretty stoked for tomorrow to do more animating.
I wanted to get something cartoony under my belt before moving on to some character related things, and I think today I managed to accheive that.

As I promised myself I would journal my workflow and here it is.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wcg0mkebm4amyz/run_01.mov

Started again working the up and down and the timing out to a bouncing ball. I didn't go to crazy as I wanted a lot of room to play with.

Here is the product as it sits after a few  hours of animating away.

run Perspective view

Heres a side profile, as it's the view I worked the most in.

Run Side View

 I approached this run different than the walk. Instead of doing both feet at the same time the whole way, I just did the 3 frames on the ground, and then I started posing away. I wanted to go really stretchy and cartoony with these legs, so I planned it around 2 really cartoony poses for the passing positions. The rest of the frames were basically used to sell the stretch and cartooniness of the leg movement.

Challenges and Struggles

Again I wanted a lot more from the arms, and in the end due to my workflow I always end up there last. So again I'm left wanting here. Id love to have added some hand animation like I was grabbing something as I ran, and also to loosen them up a bit more.
The legs I think I could have stretched them a lot more, but in the end I had to start moving forward, if I do have time I would love to come back to this run and add that extreme stretch.
The up and down of the root was pretty tricky to really nail, In the end I had to go back after doing the legs to sell the push off and add an extra frame of down movement to really feel the weight of the contact. But I must say in the end I was really happy with the up and down for a 6 frame cycle.
The feet and the arcs I really struggled getting an arc I was happy with, so I had to create a motion trail for them both, and it took a lot of finessing to get to a point I was happy. I do love maya 13 and how when you make a trail for something it only shows it when that object is selected. It makes it super efficient to have a trail on every object in the scene, and really helps when polishing. In the future I will definitely not hesitate to add a trail very early on in the scene now on pretty much every control! Really nice how they work now compared to past versions.

Day Summary

Really enjoyed animating today, a lot more  than yesterday. Really looking forward to tomorrow and I'm hoping to start having more time in the day to get shots to where I have less regrets at the end of the day. I'm hoping with this journal, I won't forget what I want to change and come the end of this, It should be pretty easy to go back to shots and know what I want to do :D
Also I am hoping I have finally learned how to upload better quality videos! Fingers crossed when I post this it works.