Day 30 - Left arm motion and hand animations

What I did today:
Today I worked on adding in the motions for the left arm as well as adding in small animations for the hands so that they are not static the entire time.

I first started by getting rid of the figure-eight markers for the right arm so that it wouldn't get in the way of the animation of the left arm.

I then turned off auto keying so that I would not make unnecessary keyframes, and then went to the middle contact position on frame 13 and moved the arm backwards, so that it would be the opposite from the other arm. I then keyframed the position and only keyframed the rotation.

I also copied the starting position and pasted it onto the end frame which is frame 25.

The hand for the end and starting frames was in an awkward position and didn't look good, so I moved it slightly forward so that it would sway back and forth when the arm was moving. I then copied the hand movement that I made onto the starting position.

I then learned that when I moved this handle control that is connected to the hand with the 'G' key it moves all the finger keys simultaneously, which makes it easier than moving the fingers individually.

Once I learned this I slightly bent the fingers on the left hand and made keyframes on the first and last keyframe, as well bending the hand just a little more on the middle contact position, so that it isn't static when moving.

I then repeated the same thing on the right hand.

Then to finish it, I went to the graph editor and deleted some of the unnecessary keyframes to make the graph smoother and so it isn't as jerky.

The reason I animated the left arm in a different manner then the right arm was to see if I could do a simpler way to animate the arm. The right arm is more refined in its movements and timing, while the left arm is simpler and is the general movement with some refinement but not as much as the right arms.

What I learned:

Today I learned about the hand control that controls all the fingers at the same time, which made making the hand animations a lot easier than doing each finger one at a time.

What I'm doing tomorrow:

Tomorrow I will work on some of the facial expressions and add some animations to the head.