Goat Design

I have created a new design for the goat character. Underneath the clay is an armature made out of gardening wire with newspaper to pad it out to reduce weight. I am happy with this design as it is more stylised and simplified than the last goat.

Quadruped Walk Cycle

I have only ever animated a quadruped character once before and they spent most of the time walking on their hind legs, so I do not have much experience animating four legged walk cycles. For the animation I used the Real Dog rig available at http://www.highend3d.com/. Although I have no problems with the technical side of Maya I still find it difficult to concentrate on the character poses as I spend my time worrying about numbers. Despite several attempts, a lot of planning and analysing of reference footage, the resulting animation is poor as there is no sense of weight and it is quite snappy. As it stands I am not benefiting from computer animation's easier working method (building up animation one layer at a time, the mighty undo button) and I am more confident animating in stop motion and therefore need to concentrate on improving my Maya animation skills.