Trotting cycle and trying something new- Dog animation Part 3

Hello all once again. It's back to business and back to the dog animation. Although I had done a cheetah walk cycle from the previous month, I feel that it had lacked the necessary details and realism of a quadruped animation, and with all the research I had now done from Professor S. Sumida power point I feel that I have missed out an important task to getting it done right.

Trotting cycle- Key poses

Trotting Cycle- Key Poses

I have then replayed the reference video which is part of the storyboard that I have done and focused a certain cycle that the dog performs, in this case, "trotting". So, I would then animate this first and then go back and continue with the story. I feel that this would refresh and hopefully change the way that I will animate this time around.

Technical Difficulties

I then however ran into another problem with one of the rigs, where I wasn't able to save the file. This meant I had to find another Dog rig for the animation. I was going to give up when I found a video tutorial that had mentioned how the rig "Nico" was a very good one to use. So below, is the new rig that I will be using. It'll be kind of cool as I would then try to make this animal have a dog-like personality.

Nico Rig

The video that suggested this was a person that I'm currently following. He has some terrific videos and tutorials. The one thing that I like about some tutorials is that I get to see the methodology and hopefully find a tip that could help me animate that more efficiently. One of the things that I saw which I have tried doing and proved successful, was how he worked on the body first and emulated the bouncing ball effect. By doing this, you will have made sure that the creature or character will have that bounce life like effect (12 Principles of animation).

 
Basic Quadruped Walk Cycle Tutorial from Chris Sokalofsky on Vimeo.

I just want to mention that I'm not copying from this tutorial. This was mainly to educate myself to how another person workflow works. Plus, the person is going through a walk cycle rather than a trot, which I am trying to achieve. Read my previous post to learn more about the difference...or : A trot is when two feet are off the ground at the same time- unlike a walk -_-

As much as I hate to try a different approach to my workflow I thought, "when else is a better time to experiment and learn from your mistakes?". So as well as animating the body first, I'm also going to try and animate without blocking out my animation in stepped mode. Instead, I will still do pose to pose but, will do this in splines. This is another topic which was mentioned from Animator mentor, and already, it feels like refreshing approach. Like my friend once said, "everyone has a different workflow but will also reach the same conclusion".

I'm going to try and aim to complete most of the trotting cycle by the end of the week, though no garuntee as I might have to pop into work, lets hope not.

Keep animating, try something new.