Animating Doreen

(Doreen is the anemone character I modeled. )

To help bring the character to life I wanted to introduce an idle animation for Doreen. My plan was to create something inspired by anemones and to help put fun friendly feel to the character.

I had the Idea to make hers arms wave like an anemones tentacles in the ocean, But to also make her movements kind of like a dance to give her a humanoid character to her to make her more approachable.

I had her rigged from when I initially made her character. However the root of the bones was at the neck of her model, which made it hard to animate the entire body like I would want as I wanted to animation to start from the base of her body. So naturally the first step was to re-rig the mesh.

As you can see the root now starts from the base of her “spine” down near her tail.

I tried to create the animations with as few bone movements as possible, so they would be easy to tweak. Especially as I was planning to use curves later on to help with the feel of the animation.

There ended up being 3 main parts of the model to animate.

The Body swinging from side to side.

2. The arms waving up and down.

3. her head bobbing from side to side.

I started with the body as this would be the root cause of most of the motion. To create the motion I just made two of the bones in the hips swing from side to side. and then adjusted the curves and timings to they were slightly out of sync with one another to give a more natural look.

Hip motion curves below. The line represents the z Quaternion rotation. As you can see I have adjusted some of the angles on the curves to create a smoother interpolation. especially on the beginning and end of the animation.