Artillery Mech Walk Cycle + Rocket Shot + Cannon Shot Animation

As part of the ALIVE! animation course, I have done a few animations for a provided mech model and rig.

For this particular section of the animation course, I created a few different animations for the mech. A walk cycle, a rocket shot, and an artillery cannon shot.

The process for animating these was different than usual, due to the overall process. Rather than blocking out the movements with all of the bones at once, I would start by editing one bone at a time, one animation channel at a time. This process was done for the torso, legs and toes. After that I learnt how to utilise "space-switching".

Space-switching is a method that uses a combination of constraints alongside an empty object in order to use the animation data from one bone to another, and then applying offset to the animation to make the movements of the mech looks more realistic (this method is supposed to be faster then animating by hand). Different sections of the body will shake and rotate around at varying speeds, while the guns demonstrate more control through utilising the damped track constraint (but with smoother/less exaggerated animation data).

For the rocket shot animation, one of the rockets needs to be constrained to an empty object. This is because the rocket bone is the child of the arm bones, so the constraint allows the bone to override the parenting and move independently.

Just like the walk cycle, the artillery shot utilised space-switching to have the whole body react strongly when the shot is fired. In this case the head reacts the strongest and quickest, as it's directly attached to the cannon, with the rest of the body following afterwards. Also the cannon itself utilised a locked track constraints to demonstrate control, even when the body and head are shaking.

This was a great learning experience, as it taught me other valuable skills that the squirrel animation part of the course didn't teach. The space-switching in particular is a very useful technique that can be used on mechanical models, or even organic characters in the right situation.