Self Study 2

In this weeks self study I created two basic animations in blender, them being a wave and a walk. This was something I had never done before so was a bit of getting used to. Following along with the Blender fundamentals 2.8 youtube playlist by the Blender youtube channel, I was able to add a meta rig (pretty much a skelton) to a basic character I had created. By doing this the character was able to take life with some animations. 

The first animation that I created was a walk, to create this I made two different keyframes; one with each leg forward. The reason I was able to only have two keyframes and it still look alright was because of the interpolation which blender uses between the created frames. I also tried to add a bit of emotion to the character just to see if I would be able to capture it without any experience. I attempting to make a dissapointed looking character walking, slightly hunched and shaking his head. In my opinion it worked pretty well (for a first attempt atleast).  The second animation I made was the character waving. For this one more keyframes were needed to capture what I was going for, as there was more parts making up the movement such as lifting the arm and waving side to side twice.  

Using the rigging system initially was a bit fiddly trying to get the character to move in the proper places. This mainly included the elbows and knees, I eventually realised I needed to add some loop cuts to the joints so that blender knew which parts could bend. With this knowledge in hand I was far more capable of getting the animations done quickly, as the animating did not take anywhere near as long compared to the actual rigging process.  Unfortunatelt however, as you can see in the wave animation, the elbows look a bit funky due to what I'm guessing is incorect amount and/or placement of these loop cuts. This was something I was not too fussed with getting looking pretty for this exercise as I was more focussed on understanding the animating perspective.