I thought I'd have an attempt at variations of a walk cycle. Here, I have the moom model running. I used reference of 2d animation I'd done in the past do make this, specifically this sequence.

The versions of the ball bounces. They need a bit of cleaning up as well, I think, but they're more or less completely there.

Attempt at the last part of the brief. Here, the Moom is attempting to catch some balls being thrown at it, using my video footage as reference. The balls aren't featured yet, but I've tried to get the poses down. I think it's going alright! I just need to tidy it up so far.

Rigging

So I had an attempt at the exercise of playing with the Moom Rig. I think I'm getting the hand of it, but moving body parts into very specific positions seems rather tricky.

Fcurves and Dopesheet Exercise

Practice with the dope sheet and fcurve tools. This seemed daunting at first, but turns out to be actually quite simple. It's just a tool I need to play with a lot, to figure out how to effectively use it, but I think I know how it works at least. Using it, I can adjust the timings of keyframes, something I did a lot with the ball bouncing animation just above.

Ball exercise

Ball exercise. Timings are really difficult to get correct on this! There almost seems to be some unseen cushion to the way the objects move, although that might just be me not knowing how to work it correctly. I think it looks a bit better than the croquet exercise, but not by much. I still need to work at it.

Croquet Exercise

Croquet exercise. I really like how the croquet mallet swings on this, but the ball speed is difficult to get right. That interaction between objects is going to be a hard thing to do, I think, so I'll need to practice it a bit.

Softimage Exercise

Okay! First time using Softimage, and our task was to create a short comic using pieces of a Mr. Potatohead model, in order to get used to the basic interface and navigation system.

This is quite tricky, but I think I've got a better understanding of it now. At least, I could arrange things around a lot better by the time I got to the last panel.