Today I started doing the diagonal head swivels. These movements are harder because of having to move on more than one axis. The looking up motion is the hardest part for these movements because I have to find the right area to stop it because if I make it look too far up it will look unnatural and if it looks too much in the downwards direction then it is pretty much just another side turn.
I started off by keeping the 50 frame space and started the movement at frame 200.
To start off the movement I first rotated the neck at the y-axis and got the right rotation. The next thing I did was move the head upwards on the x-axis, to find the best position that took me a bit of experimenting because if it looked too high up then it looked unrealistic and not natural but then once I got the right location I kept it there.
I keyframed it by pressing "I" and only keyframing the neck and not the whole character.
Instead of doing the next rotation right away I decided for this segment to have a middle point between the two diagonal looks. To add this middle point I duplicated the neutral position frame on frame 150 and moved it to frame 225. The only change I made was moving the head up a bit on the x-axis. I changed it so that when the head goes to look the other way it doesn't move all the way down into the neutral setting and it moves in a very fluid motion.
On frame 250 I did the same thing that I did on frame 200 but in the opposite direction.
After playing the animation and watching the movement I decided to tilt the head a bit on the z-axis and after watching the animation with this change I liked it a lot more because of the more natural look the small head tilt gave it.
The final thing I did was add a normal neutral position at frame 300 to give the animation an endpoint.
This is the animation so far. The framerate is because of the capabilities of my laptop but once I go to render my final animation I will do it on a much more capable device.
What I'm doing tomorrow:
As I was working today I realized that when the head moves one way before it moves in another direction there is a slight pause/ hesitation before it moves so tomorrow I will go into the graph editor and add in some hesitations to the movements, hopefully doing this will give the head movement the final bit of natural feel I think it needs. I have also decided that I will do some types of facial animation for this project. I will do some animations of the character blinking and then I will try to make different facial expressions and see how they turn out.
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