Scared of a Little Bug?

This is my final entry!

So, here are some of my thoughts on this challenge. I decided to do a 'get out of the chair' practice with this challenge and I wanted to play with some props. I wanted to give the main character a reason to get out of the chair, that's why the bug was added. Although the main reason behind it is that I thought it would be funny if the main character itself is afraid of a small bug XD

The first challenge I faced when working on the animation is not knowing which part of the body to spline first when trying to spline the character animation. I struggled with it a little bit and ended up hiding all the limbs and focusing on the body movement before moving on to the limbs one by one. This proves out to be an effective method to spline the animation for me. 

Then, it's the thousands of ideas I wanted to implement into the animation. Although I filmed a reference at the beginning, I still had this inner conflict thinking about whether I should push the poses more or change some of them to make it funnier. In the end, I tried to only select those that fit within the personality I set for the character. 

The third challenge will always be the hands. The number of hands on the character really messed up my planning for the animation from time to time. I often found myself focusing on one and ignoring the other or trying to focus on all of them and missing the one that needs the most fixing. In addition to that is the fingers animation. I don't have a lot of experience animating fingers and this challenge proves to me that I need more practice. 

Overall, I love animating the knight spider. Adding props into the animation process just makes everything much more enjoyable. Although the process includes tons of self-questioning (whether I was doing them the right way or not), I still managed to complete the challenge. I learn a lot and hopefully, I could apply that knowledge to my next practice!

I kinda finished all of the splining. I will need to watch it properly again tomorrow and refine some stuff so that the spider character has more of a personality (?). After that, it will be rendering the animation out and submitting the movie file for the contest!

This is the first blocking pass. I added some in-betweens for the first part though. Still have lots to do! Hopefully, I can finish it before the deadline! If not, it's still a good practice for me!

This is my second update. I did some more in-betweens and fixed some poses. I'm using IK for all of the arms at the moment but I'm thinking of switching some action to FK. We'll see how it goes XD

I smoothed out the graphs and edited them. I'm gonna do the fingers and other props for my next update, check the motion arcs and then refine the animation once more.