Animating- Dog animation Part 4

This is just a quick update on the progress that I have made so far. At the moment, I do see some benefits of the new workflow which I have decided to do for this project where I started with the main body, squash and stretch and then posing out the legs. I found some pros and cons to this.

Some of the benefits that I have found animating this way is that, I feel a sense of progression of my work and that I feel more confident with working with the graph editor, whereas normally it's quite confusing when working the graph editor after the blocking out my animation.

However I can see the cons in this, as sometimes I do feel like I'm animating in straight ahead, and I feel like I'm not getting anywhere. 

The two videos that are rendered out are in it's early stages and I can see a number of faults already. I have mainly focused on the body and quickly moved the legs into their key poses to get an idea of what it may look like in the future. 

One thing which has bugged me was that it felt as though the trot cycle was very slow. I think to be honest, that I have one too many poses in this and that I have to get rid of one. This problem had occurred when I was doing the run cycle with my character and that my mentor had pointed this out for me. 

I believe that the pose which I can get rid of, is the image below. The reason being is that it takes too long for the Nico leg to touch the ground. 

One too many poses

As this cycle is at it's early stage, I wanted to try and exaggerate some of the rig but, sometimes it doesn't always work out. The image below highlights the rotation of the Nico, where I think I should tone it down.

Rotation needs to be toned down

Even though I' trying to make this move as realistic as possible, I still think that there needs to be that touch of emphasis on the movements. I therefore think that the front and back needs to be clearly contrasted, to make it look more appealing. 

Contrast- feels robotic

I'm really pleased with the progress so far, even though it means going back and re-animating some poses again. 

Keep animating- try something new.