Dog Animation Part 5

Hello, I know it's been a while since I last posted something on here and I wanted to keep you guys up to date but, it's quite hard to find the time when I was busy animating, especially when I was in the zone. By the way, Happy Chinese new year guys! I didn't even get the chance to celebrate that, that's how busy I was.

Anyway, I have completed the dog animation and right now, I feel great, having it all finally done. I must say, I had one week which I thought that I was animating quite well but, after scrubbing through the poses I felt that it wash't up to scratch and I decided to re-do one part of the animation as I wasn't happy with it. It wasn't easy to acknowledge but, I knew that if I wanted to become a better animator, I will have to make the decisions such as re-doing it again.

Final video- Frames missing

With this project,  I did I a different workflow where instead of blocking it out in stepped mode in Maya, I did it whilst I was in spline mode. It was distracting, as I wanted to change a lot of the poses and I was animating in straight ahead rather than pose to pose which I was more comfortable with. Seeing the animation move like this slowed down my progress. However, what I was able to take from this was that I took more time and consideration of each pose and as i continued doing this, I noticed how I didn't tweak every in between pose and was beginning to animate in a block out workflow. 

For the next several months I will be trying to stage my animation to make it seem more appealing where for example, I added trees and some basic lighting. The problem which I have now is that I have lost at least 10 frames from the final video which may not seem a lot but, the fact that every frame is a drawing and together forms the bigger picture, will effect the whole animation. I.e what if there is a footing of the animation which doesn't make contact? All of this will add up and it's something which I must seek to resolve as soon as possible. 

Anyway, after completing the animation I knew that there are several mistakes, even my friends who I showed this to, have pointed them out and so I will be refining this animation one more time. After that I will start my next animation project, which I will talk about in a couple of days time.