Swordfox anim set

Summary
Making a random anim set with Kiel Figgin's fox rig

Project Goals:
  • General body mechanics practice

I don't really have anything specific to write so it's kind of going to be a bunch of random rambling
Video
General notes
For this character most of the key poses were pretty straightforward. Physical characteristics are often a good guide to how to pose a character, and because the character has a very top-heavy design and a long neck it was natural to lean him over a lot for a more stable appearance because he looks kind of silly standing straight up to me
The slack posture make him seem kind of lazy or floppy, so I decided to make his overall movements follow in that vein as well, especially his combat movements. When he swings his swords around, he mostly throws the swords' weights around instead of making precise cuts, with most of his movements continuing his momentum instead of stopping it, which gives him a very fluid, continuous motion
Running
Similar to his other poses, his running was partly designed to work naturally with his very long upper body and neck. By bending him backwards I could fit him into a good shape and a nice curve through his whole body. His legs are really long also and don't look very good when leaning forward, so running backwards gives them a lot of space to move under his body

It also seemed to match the expectations of his personality based on his appearance pretty well
After making the initial pose the rest was just animating a run cycle as normal
I really like to turn characters into shapes, so the transition into the run was basically just turning him into as much of a line as possible. Spinning through the jump improves the fluidity and allows him to naturally transition from the forward facing walk into the backwards run
Note that for gameplay purposes the character should probably move less sideways so he doesn't move too far out of the capsule, especially for a player character
Attack 1
Probably my favorite part of this anim
For some attacks it's easier for me to do straight ahead on the blockout instead of figuring out poses first, especially if it's a continuous motion like this one. I simply make poses from one to the next based on where the forces are coming from and going. For example, when he swings his sword around at the beginning, the sword will naturally swing around and spin him around and back, then when the sword embeds in the ground and he continues his backward momentum to move onto that sword. To move forward again, jumping off the sword is also a pretty natural choice

The tail is also a great help in improving the flow since it's a line (I animated the tail after polishing the body animation)
For this attack in particular, I wanted to avoid him touching the ground through the sequence which is why he balances on the swords. The swords are convenient pivot points to swing himself around or jump off of
As mentioned earlier, I like to play with shapes a lot. One of my favorite shapes is making characters into perfect balls, which I did here when he jumps into the air. A line shape is natural to make before and after turning into a ball, kind of like rolling a thread into a spool
When animating a spinning character in a ball shape I prefer to make the ball spin very smoothly. It's common for people to make the character spin like on the right, but I think the left one is more fun to look at
For animating the contacts with the sword, I set the arm to IK when necessary and used my pivot tool to make the IK hands and feet follow the sword, and baked it when necessary. I go over all the same methods in my workflow video
Attack 2
There isn't much to talk about here since it's pretty much the same stuff as the first attack. To animate the sword spinning around his body I changed the space frequently between world space translation/rotation, world space rotation only, aim space, etc as necessary
Reference wasn't used directly for this animation, but this part was inspired both by this person twirling a sword around their body and a girl doing the same with a baton that I saw back when I was in school. This video made the physics of the sword easy to fake