Link to blockout animation: https://mega.nz/file/d3l0STyZ#uWBc5WLa68Co8BkyFgHvFvNhNDWWPwK11mkS32Cs
The next animation features a female wolf named Maya. The animation has been on hold for about 7-ish months, due to a big model overhaul and other good stuff :D.
Before I started working on this animation, I recorded a video of myself acting the scene. Under the recording I tried to take it into account that the character will be fairly large. There are many movements in the reference video I did, that won’t be easy with a massive body, so those need a lot of freestyle animation. A suit that is the same volumetric size and looks like the animated characters would be useful.
Inside Blender I can place the videos in the scene as a plane, right next to the animated character. From there I begin to block out the animation, doing the most important poses. I have placed a dummy mattress in the scene, so I know the dimensions of the object the character will interact with.
Instead of making the animation smooth from the start, I set the graphs to constant to make it play pose to pose. It gives a better overview of the animation.
After doing the initial pose blocking, I will go through it again to add more poses. More poses before changing the animation graphs to smooth, will make the smoothed animation look better.