Audio by https://x.com/SilSalTaken
Animation
I used this animation to compare manually keying everything versus building looping layers and blending them together. The looping approach feels way more powerful, mainly because I can go back and tweak the loops as much as I want without having to copy and paste a million keyframes just to test a small change. That said, manual keying still has its place—it lets me hit more specific motions, like that “suck into the head then pull back” move, which I can then blend into the next loop.
There’s definitely room for improvement here. Some parts still feel pretty robotic and stiff, but I ran out of mental energy and decided to call it for now. As I get faster at putting something like this together, I’ll be able to spend more time polishing and pushing the quality further.