Mammoo Modelling - Animating

After my character was fully rigged, weight painted and UV mapped it was time to begin animating. Before I started animating I was actually quite nervous because prior to this module I had only really properly animated one other time last year and I found it to be quite hard to grasp and do properly. This was still the case this time as well but only in the beginning, the more I practiced and asked questions to others around me who knew more about it the more confident in myself I became and soon enough I was able to successfully animate my character.

It wasn't without its difficulties though as I had to adapt to my new skills fast this didn't really give me the time I wanted or needed to properly appreciate and play around with the new skills that I had learned. The character itself was relatively easy to animate once I got going, his rigging was similar to that of the previous Alien model I had made but lacked some of the others skeleton making it over all easier to animate without worrying about problems with facial rigging.

I wouldn't really say that anything during the animating process held me back but there was a few things that I needed to keep a careful eye on to make sure that nothing went wrong such as the fact that I hadn't locked off any of the joints on my character. I knew that I would have to take into account that its points of articulation had no real end so when animating I made sure that when the Mammoo character was looking up his body made no harsh movements with only minor twists to his torso and head to avoid him folding in on himself.

Overall I really enjoyed animating this character and I feel a lot more confident in my animating abilities than I did when I first started this module, animating is now something that I can look forward to in the future rather than dread and feel nervous about. I am genuinely proud when I look at my character in motion and have put up some videos showing some playblasts of his movements when he was still a work in progress.

This first video shows Mammoos walk cycle, walking over to his fishing box, when I first animated him he was a bit slippy and seemed to slide around the scene when he turned rather than walking, this is the refined result which im happy with.

For this scene I wanted to really try and capture the feel of Mammoo really struggling to get his catch out of the "lake". I tried to animate him showing the power and weight of whatever it is that is on the end of his fishing line and to show this power struggle between Mammoo and the mystery fishing rod catch.

This last playblast shows Mammoo picking up his fishing rod and moving his box out of the way. I had to improvise a lot for this scene as when I originally animated him he was too far away and too fat to pick up his fishing rod (the place where he first sits down was meant to be his final placement before picking up the rod) I had to instead modify this and make him look like he couldn't reach his rod and instead shimmies on his bottom to be closer to the rod so that he can begin fishing.