Productive saturday!

Got quite a lot of work done today.
I've been working on tweaking curves today, mostly all the ease in and outs and trying to prevent "floaty-animation". I'm still working with linear curves, so it's still looks a bit choppy.
Last thing I did tonight was to start working on his fingers. I also need to work on the ending, since I haven't done any work on Chris hands in the part where he holds Joy, and I know there is a bit of correction needed there to prevent mesh-collision between the two characters.

I have made an observation through this walk-cycle as well. If you move the character too low so there is a lot of bend in the knees and you then add a lot of movement from side to side on the upper-body you get a "drunk walk"! I have really been working a lot to try and prevent that look on my walk. I want it to be a walk that you can see in kids that have been playing around for a long time. They tend to move about a lot, but they are obviously tired at the same time.. (hope that made sense..)
So I guess my conclusion is that when your animating a bipedal character with no facial or visual clues to show their age or mood, the difference between tired/exhausted and drunk is hard to figure out. Hehe..

Got feedback from both my room-mate and Daniel today so that helped me a lot.

Here's a preview of my animation as it looks at the moment:




As you can see in the clip I have changed the story a bit from the original idea. Joy's jump in the first block sent the wrong message.. Seemed like she was attacking Chris rather than playing around.

I need to sort out the fingers and the holding pose tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be able to move over to polishing the piece sometime during the afternoon. I was hoping to get two days to polish it, but I'll have too see about that..
It's 1:05 AM now so it's time to call it.