Recent Things

Been a while since I posted, but figure it's at least time for an update.
A friend had been down from england for about 6 weeks to work on his animation. Was a good experience and a lot was learned by both parties. Hopefully he can go home with some knowledge and skills that will help him land his first job in the industry.
I on the other hand have decided to put animation  even further on the back burner than it was before and focus on my present career. Being torn about career paths I've noticed doesn't really help productivity for anything. Animation and my work seem to suffer when I try to make time for both.

All that aside I did animate a couple things while he was down.
I did a demo for him on a couple things, but the one i'm going to post was a wolf walk I did.
Here is the link.
Wolf Walk

In keeping with my previous posts i'll discuss a bit about the process.
I started it much like I would my standard human walk. I did the up and down of the main control. Than the up and down of the upper body. I did the front feet with the contacts coming 2 frames before the down extreme. Just animating the z axis of the feet, and the y. I copied that animation onto all 4 feet and worked out the gait. I was doing a fairly slow dog walk and my reference showed when a dog walks slowly his back foot starts moving forward first which than leads the front foot of the same side forward. So I set that up and finished the feet off.
Worked my way up to the hips. Did contraposto in the upper body. Worked up right through the neck to the head and the ears. Than used the same timing to resolve what was going in the tail.
The greatest challenge was definitely figuring out the gait for a walk so slow for a dog. Also the rig had some quirks to it but worked it all out in the end.
Cheers for now.