When my character had been fully rigged and weight painted, I started with the animation process. Firstly I made sure to save a separate copy of my fully rigged character ready to go, and created new save files for each animation.
To animate my character I would place the keyframe at the start of the timeline, then I would position my character in the way I wanted, select over everything and press ‘S’ on the keyboard to capture the keyframe. I made sure that whenever I wanted to create a new keyframe that I would select the position on the timeline first and then pose my character as if I posed my character before the timeline, I would lose all progress. I continued this method through each of my animations and found that it worked quite well.
I started off with animation one which was my walking sequence. When I was creating this animation I was hoping to capture her attitude and sass whilst also applying the principles of animation in order to create a realistic walk cycle. I used squash and stretch by creating a frame in which she bounced in between steps, this helped the walk cycle seem more realistic. I also used exaggeration by exaggerating the hip sway a little more than usual.
In my second animation I created a throne scene. Firstly, I set up a very simple scene with a throne and a few steps. In this animation I used the pose to pose animation principle in which I had a few key poses that I knew I wanted her to be in and the rest of the frames would be her getting into the next position. I encountered a few issues with this animation. Originally I had not created elbow controls but realised when making this animation that she needed to have them in order to be in the correct position without the rig breaking.
In my final animation I created an idle/flying sequence. I wanted to try and experiment with the principle of anticipation and exaggeration in this sequence. I tried to do this by adding a kneeling frame before she starts to fly as I thought it would seem as if she was preparing to take off. I also tried to incorporate some exaggeration into her idle flying position as she bobs up and down.
