Animating MooM

Before creating a finished animation I started a few that were ditched and never saved, but my first finished animation went pretty well I think, I call it a finished animation simply as it creates a complete loop.

First thing that comes to my head is that I will need to learn to loop the animation for next time, but for now this should be fine.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the way this animation turned out although there are some glaring problems that I will need to learn from for next time, first of all he kicks his legs forward to far and not back enough, and he doesn't really lift his feet off of the floor which is particularly a problem with he is bringing his back foot forward as the maintained contact would mean that he was sliding his feet across the floor which is unnatural or almost like he were walking backwards.

While it was kind of intentional I also kind of over did the squash and stretch and movement up & down and side-to-side, I wanted the animation not to look stiff and to really exaggerate the movements so that I could then tone them down in later iterations if needed, and given the speed Moom should be walking here it certainly does need toning down, but regardless if it were done on purpose I acknowledge it's something that need improvement.

This was the beginning of one of my animations, my intention was to kind of set up the animation with the first frame but I don't think that worked especially with an animation that would require so much movement as a running animation, I think next time I should start at a more neutral position, although as it is supposed to be a cycle that might not work. another problem I think I had is that I tried to animate every little movement at one time which may have complicated things for me, maybe next time I should just focus on the basic animation and the add in the other details later (Which is what I did with the walk cycle.)

Including this screenshot gave me an idea though, maybe I will play around with simply posing Moom, almost like a silhouette stage before I move onto actually animating the pose, I should create about 10 poses for each animation (Walk, run, Idle) and then choose a few maybe that I want to actually animate.