I tried to make most of the changes that were mentioned below. I'd say about a day or so and it's done.

Clampin' it

Hey Jeff, I didn't read your post until now but I think I KIND of demonstrated what you were saying. Still a work in progress but I like where it's going.

Check this iteration out!

Lip Sync

Here's my second blocking in attempt. Let me know what you think.

Final Quadruped Run Cycle

Here's my "final". Any comments would be much appreciated.

Running Quadruped Cycle Part 2

Hey Jeff I didn't catch your comment until I had made this playblast. I'll give your suggestions a shot. Thanks for the input.

Running Quadruped Cycle Part 1

So the walk has turned into a run cycle. The rig just isn’t made to walk like a dog. The creatures hind legs are too long in relation to the front legs. This makes for 2 different strides. The hind legs would be long and slow while the front legs would be much quicker. Now I must say that the creature is capable of having an evenly paced walk cycle. It’s just that it’s not the way the creature SHOULD walk. In the walk cycle I saw, the legs are always bent, making the walk inefficient. If I had to hazard a guess, I feel the animal’s main method of locomotion would be akin to a rabbit. It would hop.

However, when I realized this, I really didn’t want to give up on this model. The rig is too customizable to just throw it to the side. Instead, I decided to tackle a run cycle. This is a pretty interesting one to do. Right off the bat was the realization that I wasn’t going to be able to tackle this like a normal walk cycle. I used a similar method of using a “treadmill” to avoid skating occurring on the feet, but this method differed in the sense that I had to animate most of the body at once (as opposed to just the feet, then dealing with the rest later). After a couple days this is what I have so far. I’m fairly pleased with how it’s turned out so far. There are still controls I haven’t even touched yet as I’m just trying to nail the core components at the moment. Limbs are “colliding” with each other so I have to figure that out as well. The animation isn’t as smooth as I would want it to be but the graph cleaning will come last.

Anywho, here’s what I have so far.

Comments very much appreciated

Walkin' Dog v2

Added some more overlap on the ears, tried to fix the popping on the front leg, fixed a tiny little pop that was happening in the back leg.

Also, it looks like the front left paw is bouncing a bit when it hits the ground, but I've fixed that already.

Woof!