Week 9-Continuing ident 2 part 3

The main thing I need to do to finish this part of the ident 2 was to animate the robots movement. To begin I positioned the robot ready to start the animation by the bench. To get him in the starting position I rotated one of his bones so his leg was out to one side and then rotated the whole of the robot so he was standing on his leg leaning towards the balloons.

Next I rotated the bone of the left arm so he was reaching out for a balloon. The arm was not quite long enough and so I edited the position of the foot bone to make him stand on his toes. I then used the move tool to position the other arm by moving the bone into a position which appeared like the robot was trying to balance.

Afterwards I used auto key to locate the start and end points of the robots walk, this being from frame 0 to 25.

Once again I used auto key to animate the robot, this time to make him stand upright before he starts to walk. To do this I moved to key frame 10 and with the rotate tool repositioned the leg which points sidewards to be in line with the rest of the body, and then rotated the whole body into a vertical position.

Now I had the basic movement of the robot picking up the balloon and moving towards the bear. At the moment the balloon is not in the robots hand throughout this movement and so I added extra key frames to keep the two together.

Next I realised the robot was still standing on his toe once he had stood up and so I added key frames to make him lower down on his whole foot as he stood up.

At this point he was floating in the air and so I lowered him to the floor at frame 10 while the auto key was still on.

When I watched the animation I thought the robot should bring his arm in as he gets the balloon, and so animated the upper arm bone and then the lower bone so the robot moved his arm and the balloon in as he straightened up.

Next I used the rotate tool to apply a point to the toe in the air at the beginning of this part. I used the auto key while doing this and removed the point as the robots body moved to an upright position so the foot could land on the floor.

Then, with the auto key, I moved the robot forward towards the bear ready to add walking movement in between.

At this point I felt there was a need to make more alterations to the position of the hand during the animation. To do this I used auto key and repositioned the upper arm bones so that the robot hands the balloon to the bear.

While trying to do this I found the robot was too tall to reach the bear with a straight arm. So, at frame 25 I applied a rotate at the hip by moving his legs upwards in front of the body. Then I rotated the character as a whole so that his feet were flat on the floor and upper body was leaning towards the bear.

A few minor alterations to the hands position was made so it lined up perfectly.

At frame 36 I reversed the leaning process, firstly by rotating the body to a vertical position and then moved the legs so they were parallel with the body.

I then watched the animation and found that as the robot leant towards the bear his feet slid backwards and forwards. To resolve this I edited the robots position in these key frames with the move tool until they remained in one spot.

Then with auto key I made sure that this movement was realistic by adding more key frames. I started the movement with the lower arm as I felt it would look best with this starting to move first.

Afterwards I went on to edit the robots movement as the bear floated up with the balloon. Once again I used auto key to make the robot raise his hands towards his mouth to show his shock.

Later I will create the robots walk between picking up the balloon and passing it to Ted.