Continuing on with project Echoes, I have begun work on a couple animations for various characters including the Centaur, Fae (the player character) and the Bark Basher (our boss character).

Each character has a very different personality and function so going to each animation requires a different mindset and ideas on how they interact with the environment. The couple of rough animations I have here are the Fae's primary cyclic animations, the Centaur's canter and the Bark Basher's basic attack.

So far, I'm pleased with how the Fae is progressing. Here I have simply tested with different timings and poses and have been given the go ahead from the directors  for this time frame of about 24 frames for the main cyclic jog animation. When I begin to polish I would like to push the 'springy-ness' of the legs, really getting a feel for how agile and light-footed the character is.

The Centaur is proving to be a tad more problematic. Trying to hit the poses needed to show the character's flexibility has proved difficult without messing with some of the skinning and breaking the realism of the character. As I'm not going to find any centaurs down the local petting zoo, most my research has looked at movies and games for inspiration (specifically Harry Potter, God of War and Narnia). Of course, horses have played a great part in getting the base poses down but the trying to work out what the human part is doing or what they are thinking has been a challenge to say the least.

Finally the Bark Basher has proved to probably be the most fun to work with so far. His huge, cumbersome size coupled with them massive bulldozer-like arms make for some interesting shapes whilst also asking some fundamental physics questions  - like how the heck does he eat?!?!