This is the final render of an animation short I created to update my demo reel, the animation shows my understanding of weight in movements, it also demonstrates personality for a character, and examples the 12 principles of animation.
I used Blender 2.8 to animate the character, which is a free rig called "Vincent" available from Blender Cloud, a very good animation rig for free, recommend it!
Progression Shorts
Here are the stages of animations that eventually got to the final render.
Initial Blocking
This was the initial blocking stage of the animation. I was trying to get an understanding of the timing. At the start I wasn't really thinking about the character and his intent, there were a few poses I liked in the blocking and they had good silhouettes, but there was a lack of purpose in the overall animation I felt.
Smoothing it Out
In this video you will see that I made quite a few changes. I realized that the character had no real intent, so I decide to change some of the poses to make him have a bit more personality and intent, I also took out a few key poses to simplify it, as there were too many movements for very simple action like bending down. I also took out the exaggerated shock he gets from sniffing the cube, because it didn't make sense, instead I got him to lick the cube and have a delayed reaction.
Final Clean Up
This was the final smoothing stage, I offset some of the hands, added in overlap with the hair to give it that softness and bounce. I cleaned up the knees as much as I could, as I wasn't able to get the motion path in Blender to work in order to smooth it out. I adjusted some of the timing to give him more time to feel like he is thinking that adds that sense of life in him, and of course added in blinks, otherwise he will have really dry eyes!