For the past several weeks I having been working on my second, second year university project, producing a trailer for a reboot of an old childrens animation - Roobarb, using the style of Studio AKA's Lost and Found.
Whilst I really enjoyed this project and learnt a lot about organic single mesh rigging and animation I am sad that in trying to achieve the style of Lost and Found, I spent more time focusing on modelling the character and environment, reducing the amount of time I had to actually animate it.
Having a challenging character, a quadruped dog, as my first experience with using the CAT rig and its animation tools was another drawback that took away from this project for me a little. Tinkering with the rig envelopes constantly during that stage, trying to find the balance between each bones control zones was difficult and in the end still resulted in stretching and/or clipping of areas in the final animation.
Although I don't intend to work more on this project as I feel I have learnt what I can from it, I wholly plan on working much more on this, most likely starting with a simpler bipedal character to better get to grips with the basics.
Commenting on my final animation, I am happy with the finished result and even with the very noticeable clipping issues, I have learnt from this and will be able to put more consideration into my characters requirement at the design and model stage to allow for a much smoother rigging and animation process. I'm also glad I was able to include audio into this animation because, even though subtle, adds a lot to it when watching it.
And finally, my finished animation.
