Billy Bob log 2

My gods... it's just a simple running cycle, but why can't I get it to look right?!

Made a lot of mistakes, one of them being reluctant to get a tutor/lecturer to critique what I have so far because I think it's not enough to look at. That would've save me hours of messing around alone. Gotta keep asking myself, "What's more important? Your learning, or your pride?" On a small plus side, after hearing my report of problems, he said I did a pretty good job cleaning the mess up, but not good enough to avoid starting over.

• Mistake 1: Did not start by moving/rotating hips. Started with legs then feet.
• Mistake 2: Adjusted frame number in Dope Sheet but only scaled the second half, for unfathomable reason. End up with lots of x.5 frames.
• Mistake 3: Did not get tutor to critique.
• Mistake 4: ... damn, I forgot just now.

Tutor/lecturer (y'know, we just call 'em professors in the U.S., but nooooo, not the English. They have many names.) recommended approach:

• Set translation key frames across floor (z-axis in my case) using that anchor thing.
• Set all in Stepped mode in F-Curve.
• Pose hip movement and rotation.
• Pose legs only.
• Pose "shoulder" rotation.
• Remove animation from that anchor thing, thus resetting everything back to origin point, but keeping animation on everything.
• Render to Flipbook and cross reference time and pace against reference videos, and calculate frame range for the run speed I want.
• Scale in Ripple mode in Dope Sheet, still in Stepped mode, to frame range of my choice.
• Spline, start refining from the hip out, doing feet, and eyes and eyebrows last.

Unrelated-ly, doing this project made me found out what C Walk is, and now I really want to learn them. I like the music. It looks cool and really fun. Unlike break dancing, I don't have to use my wrist and hands in C Walk, thus protecting them from harm, which is important because I need my hands not only for work, trade, leisure, but also lots of other, important stuff. What stuff? Stuff inappropriate for scholastic progress log blog.

You dirty, dirty minded people.....