C h I c H a - 3 d - W I P

This is a home project about "Chicha Loca Mc Caine", the most acrobatic dog in Floresta (my neighborhood). "Chicha" as we simply called her, went to Dog Paradise a couple of years ago so I decided to bring her back to life with CG so we could keep her fresh in our memory.

W A L K C Y C L E S

These cycles try to imitate different doggy walking styles.

	In this simple cycle we are able to watch Chicha walking slowly and cautiously. Animation takes place without displacement.
	Here we see Chicha troting in circles. This is a first approach to it where I have only animated feet and tail. It was done using armatures with IK solvers to keep the feet on the ground (a good tutorial on this can be read at BlenderChar) and the new Non Linear Animation (NLA) features of Blender 2.25/Publisher to assign the circular path to the walkcycle action.
	Things are getting more complex. Now we can appreciate the importance of secondary movement in giving in naturality (thanks Carlos for that line). Here I have defined more actions: ears, neck, tongue and jaw movement. Once again I used the NLA editor to blend the different actions together. Man, I really like this NLA editor.... Just to get Caronte mad I have rendered it with borders ;-)

N O N C Y C L I C A L A C T I O N S

These are single actions to be used in different scenes. They include single actions to be combined with other actions and complex actions where I chose to animate every bone.

Chicha is getting ready to receive some careesses.

S C E N E P R E V I E W S

Here some scenes excerpts.

A few seconds of the first scene (UPDATE: take 4!). Still some things to fix and improve but at least some real action. I added a little of RVK animation to make her blink and give more naturality.

Most of the "sliding" effects are corrected now (maybe there's still some near the end of the sequence :-?).

Resolution 512x384, codec DivX 4. No sound. (~ 1.5 MB)