Bigdog animation

Exercise 1:

i)      If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.

    The legs will move alternately, according to this sequence: FR moves together with BL, FL moves together with BR.

ii)     Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.

      When bigdog is falling to the right, his FL and BR will move across to support his right side. Then bigdog's FR and BL will then move across and the cycle continues for awhile to allow bigdog to regain balance fully.

iii)   Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.

You should draw the key poses. You don’t need to draw well – but you must show the leg positions and the body rotations around the X, Y and Z axes for each key pose.

Storyboard:

Animating BigDog

Firstly, I created 3 key poses by translating bigdog to show the general movement in that direction. 

I then adjusted the body by rotating it to show that bigdog is falling over. I moved the legs accordingly, FL and BR crossing over, followed by FR and BL. After a few steps, bigdog finally regains its balance. I rotated the body accordingly to exaggerate the fall and to make my animation more realistic. I also played around with the translation of the body by moving it down when bigdog lands and moved it up at the end when bigdog has regained his balance and stood up straight.

I added a small step at the end to place bigdog's legs at their final positions.

Final video:

 Reflection:

This exercise was very challenging as we have to brainstorm on how bigdog will move, as well as observe videos to figure out the movement of the legs. The movement has to be logical and realistic. Other than the legs, the rotation and translation of the body must also be considered. I experimented with different rotations to end up with the one shown in the video. This exercise taught me the importance of the thinking process during animation, especially when animating irregular movements such as this.

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