Hey guys, I started animating a rat which is supposed to walk quickly to a certain point in the scene, then stop, then walk some more in another direction, then turn around and quickly run away. I've done a rough animation of the movement path and timing with a proxy geo and now I want to animate the actual rat. My first…
This sounds like a non-interactive animation, so you don’t have to work within the constraints of walk cycles and automated blending. Instead, this is a performance, you’re communicating the rat’s internal mental state through what it is doing. You’ll also want to make sure the feet are connecting with the floor, not just…
Animate the walk cycle along with any other repetitive movements of your beast. Learn how to use the action editor in Blender. You can animate on top of any movement non destructively. Save you loads of time and effort in the end. There are a lot of tutes on this stuff.
One trick is to parent a temporary camera to the root’s planar movement (minus up axis), so it follows the character, and the character through the camera looks like it’s static in space. Then use it to animate “in place”.