Portfolio 02 - Character Animations

Introduction

This week had a set of tasks relating to rigging and animating a character in Blender, after running through the provided tutorials I went ahead and used a base mesh I usually use for characters, optimized the topology and made sure it was ready to rig.

 I have previously worked a bit using the blender addon Meta rig so I used this opportunity to use this for my rig, which has the ability to generate useful controller objects based on a humanoid character.

Below are three animations I threw together using my rigged model and Blenders animation keyframes.

Wave

I didn't need a reference for this animation, I just began by setting up the base keyframes between the largest movements and proceeded to add the intermediate movements to make the animation look more fluid.

Walk

I used two references for the walk cycle, these gave me a good starting point for the walk cycle movements, the walk cycle looks quite robotic but I actually think it fits this model as it has an i-robot aesthetic.

Below are the references used.

Idle

Idle didn't need reference either I simply added a breathing and slight movement which makes the character look alive.