Animation - Big Dog

Animation - Big Dog

For this exerise, it is basically to apply everything that we had learnt from the previous exercise.

1. If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.

Basically, the sequene of the leg movements are FR -> BL -> FL -> BR

2. Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.

When the body is being pushed to one side, the centre of gravity would have been shifted and in order to not fall over, the legs would cross over to the other quickly (as shown in the video) to balance the weight of the BigDog and balance the centre of gravity.

3. Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.

 

For this exercise, the main thing is to get the sequence of the leg movement to be right. In addition, the shifting of the weight after it has been kicked. To start of the animation, the first thing is to get the main key poses. Compared to the previous exercise, this exercise is more difficult as you have to check that at every key pose, the bigdog is balanced, and when it moves on to the next pose, there is a weight shift.

This is the first attempt of my animation:

I was quite satisfied with my work, however, there wasn't a proper ending at the end thus, i tried to add and give it an ending. What I had included in this animation is when it finally comes to a stop and I tried to make it shift back a little because it should not stop immediate, it should show a slight ease out.

Afterall, there were lots of things to take note for this exercise, such as: Key Poses, Weight Shifting, Ease in Ease Out, Timing and anticipation.

Overall, I believe I can do better for this animation and it is definitely more challenging than the previous exercise.