Animating a Quadruped

I realised I was being quite ambitious, wanting to animate a quadruped when I have only worked with a biped a couple of times. My rig that I created for my alien character wasn't as accurate as I would have hoped, I ended up rigging the front legs wrong so that it bent the wrong way. When it came to animating I just had to work around this and do the best I could with what I had. I looked at a lot of reference videos to get a better understanding of how quadrupeds walked, especially cats in particular. I then took one video and broke it down into the main poses, contact, down, passing, up, contact. By doing this I had a clear image of each pose and could then work from these to block out my animation.

As my alien was jumping down from a tree I found a really useful video that I ended up referencing a lot. It was really helpful that it was in slow motion as well as I could take my time going through the video and analyse each shot and see how the body reacts through the air and on impact. There's a lot more to take into consideration when animating a quadruped, the legs have to work with each other yet they are offset at different points.

I also decided to follow a proper workflow this time, in the previous module I had tried to block out my animation first and then change this to spline, however I had a lot of issues with it and ended up just working straight from auto-tangent. This time I wanted to try again and I actually succeeded, by blocking out just the key poses first and not worrying about timings it makes things a lot easier. You are able to just concentrate on building good poses and putting in key ones to build your foundation. From here I then went in between and put breakdowns, the computer needs as much information as possible, without the necessary information it will just guess. Which is the issue I had before, I wasn't detaield enough with my blocking. The more time you spend in blocking, the easier it is when it comes to clean up. Below is the final stage of the tree jump animation, I'm really happy with this as I feel like I have a better understanding of the whole process and can progress this further next time. Blocking, adding in breakdowns and then going into spline is a far easier and cleaner workflow than what I was previously doing.