Lucy Walk Cycle Reel

Lucy Walk Cycle Reel

This is an animation I've worked on for a period of time.  Lucy was a character I rigged and animated in undergrad and has continued to be a character I'm constantly learning from.  With this animation I learned more about quadrupeds and how they move.  Quadrupeds are more difficult to animate then you might think.  My biggest learning experience with this animation was the idea of how her upperbody moves in correlation with how her lowerbody moves.  I also learned about adding fidgets to walk cycles and how they bring personality and life to characters.  I was very inspired by how my own dog Rivers moves and acts as both Lucy and Rivers have similar personalities.  Both of them also have similar physical characteristics such as big floppy ears.   One of the signature actions my dog does is to stick her tongue out and close her mouth with an excited and playful facial expression.  She does this when she's very excited to play with her toys.  With Lucy I wanted to have the same signature action but Lucy style with exaggerated movements in her ears and tongue.   I also learned more about facial animation as Lucy's face is a skull and in the moment she looks over, she needs to look happy and smile.  When Animating the head I actually never thought about the curves that the head motion makes.  The big indicator to visualize Lucy's curves was her nose.  I was constantly watching Lucy's nose to see what kind of curves her head motion was creating.  After understanding her head motion I worked on her ears and learned about how they drag behind and the floppy look they can give when being dragged.  Overall it was a super fun experience animating Lucy and learning more about characters that are just like her!  For animating Lucy I worked in Autodesk Maya 2020 and for rendering I used Pixar's Renderman!  The music is called Summer Time by MorningLightMusic.