493 Senior Portfolio 2024

     This week I was implementing feedback into my cat’s walk cycle. I really wanted to make sure it looked like muscles were being used, so I paid close attention to how the shoulder rotated and the relationship it has with the other body parts. For example, the hips rotating opposite of the chest. I then worked on the small details such as the toes on the paws closing before it hit the floor and spreading more and more as the cat put pressure on his leg. Once I was fully done with the feet, making sure that each back foot goes into the same footprint as the front foot giving cat’s their unique gait, I offset them. I noticed that the back foot would move into the front foot’s footprint before the front foot had already stepped down. These little features that almost seem like it’s not worth exploring actually made my animation come alive.       My favorite parts were working on the bounciness of the whiskers, ears, and tail. Once I thought about tails and whiskers as segments where th

     For this week, I got a little behind my schedule because I overrode my runway model’s cat walk with some kind of random attack animation that I started but only got two poses down. I was so sad to find that out, because I knew that I foolishly did my walk cycle on one file. I know I shouldn’t have, but I plan to catch up in the next three days, since I don’t work at my job those three days. I’m still fixing up that walk cycle back to its original progress, and I’ll be focusing on implementing the feedback I received from class afterwards.      I also showed up to Mark Pullyblank’s office hours to talk about the walk cycle of a quadruped. I couldn’t quite tell what was wrong with my quadruped walk, because I was looking at very similar references. In that zoom meeting though, it was very eye-opening seeing how Mark used the reference compared to how I did. He drew lines to measure how straight the back was, how far the legs went, and how angled each part of the body was. I also lea

     I decided to go back and polish a runway model’s catwalk cycle that I had started before. I wanted to pair this animation with the quadruped cat’s walk cycle. I grabbed the waist controller to curve with the hips, so that her body had more of an “S” silhouette. I moved the keys for the hair, earrings, and hands slightly offset. I didn’t particularly want the offsets to be 2 keys each or anything. I just played around with it until it felt good.      My biggest issue was studying how differently people walk with heels versus flat shoes. I found that they barely tilted their feet into the ground. Perhaps to not crease the front of the heeled shoe. Furthermore, they didn’t really lift their feet all that much to begin with. I had to film myself wearing heels and forced myself to be natural and unnatural to understand why. My feet in heels felt like they were already tilted and higher than what they were used to. Walking with a lift was tiring. I more wanted to drag the back of my hee

     This week, I spent time doing the quadruped walk. I first gathered a lot of references of cats walking from the front, side, and top view. I know that all the cat’s feet touch the ground at different times, but I didn’t want to confuse myself. I figured that I would animate the beginning, middle, and end poses first and then offset each step to reflect how cats walk in real life. For the beginning pose on key 1, I had the cat’s front right paw and back left paw stretched forward, while the front left paw and back right paw were stretched back. For the middle pose on key 12, I had the exact opposite feet positioning. Finally, I copied and pasted the beginning pose onto the ending pose on key 25 for a seamless loop.     I did some in-betweens on keys 7 and 19 so that the paws moved in arcs since cats tend to put one foot over the other as they walk. I also added some side-by-side movements in the spine, shoulder, and hips. At the moment, I’m animating solely on 3s, and I’m not going