CAT Animating.

After experimenting slightly with the basic animation, I begun to look more into the movement of my character and I wanted to make him walk realistically, I attempted many times trying to apply a CatRig however I kept finding that it wouldn't work and I ended up getting very frustrated, I then took a break and started fresh, I tried two different techniques for building the rig, firstly I tried applying a Base Human pre-set cat rig which I found a lot of problems with, and secondly I used a technique taught in the lectures where I could build my own cat rig. I also managed to fix one of the problems I was having with animating the boots with the model, I decided that the easiest way to do this was to just target weld the boots to the characters leg, this would then be part of the whole model.

Creating a CAT rig from scratch

To do this I opened up the helpers tab and created a CAT object parent, from here this then allowed me to create a starting point which would be the pelvis of the character, then from there I could create other parts of the body such as legs, arms, spine etc until I had fully built my rig.

It was important that the majority of the bone was covered by the model itself, it was also vital that I aligned up the joints in the correct places as this would be beneficial when it started to animate and the joints of the model bent.

Once I was satisfied with the overall positions and sizes of the CAT rig I could then start to animate, to do this I added a Skin modifier from the modify panel, and I then clicked 'add bones' and chose the bones of the CAT rig, this then meant that the model was allocated the bone structure of the rig.

I then clicked on the bone structure and went into the motion tab, from here I then clicked on the 'Add layer tab' and help the mouse, and this brought up some options, I selected the 'Add CAT motion layer' and this applied a walking movement to my character.

When this was played the character movement quite dramatically, there was a lot of swaying movement and some of the limb movement didn't quite look right, overall however the process was successful and with some editing I would've been able to change the way it moved to make it walk more freely and realistically.

Using pre-set CAT rigs

I then watched a couple of tutorials explaining how to use CAT rigs and how to adjust settings, I decided that I would restart the process and hopefully try and incorporate the eyes I created for the model this time, I thought that it would be ideal to attempt both techniques and I could then decide which I found best.

The process of creating a pre-set CAT rig was very similar to creating my own except it eliminated the process of creating individual bones, once drawn out I had a basic structure of a human, and all I needed to do was modify the shape and positions of each bone to fit my model, one useful tip I found was that once I had created one limb, I could copy the settings and apply it to the other side, this meant that each side of the rig was symmetrical. 

Again once I was happy with the positioned and the scale of the bones I could go through the same process of adding a CAT motion layer and apply the walking motion, this gave a similar result.

Once I had the character moving I was then able to apply a couple of techniques I learnt from tutorials on-line, I learnt how to change how much each bone moves, rotates, rolls etc. This mean that I was able to position the arms by the side of the character to give a more convincing walk, as well as change all the dramatic movement which made the walk look quite unrealistic, these settings could've been played with for ages, however I managed to achieve a fairly decent walk and I am happy with the outcome.

Another helpful tool I picked whilst watching the tutorials was being able to assign a specific object into a group, this was extremely helpful when trying to select the whole of the rig, I simply selected the rig and then at the top of the screen theres a small drop down menu which enabled me to give the objects a name, in this case I assigned the name 'Character Biped' (Although incorrect, should have been 'rig'), and from then on all I had to do was click on the drop down menu and select the name and this would select the whole rig.

This is the overall outcome of using the CAT pre-set rig, I am extremely happy with the result after finding it so frustrating at first, I have now got more used to working with CAT and understand it much more, and this was benefited by making mistakes and practising.

I did also manage to attach the eyes to the model so that it follow the movement and this was done by simply linking the eyes to the rig head. 

I was very fortunate with the animating that no part of the model interfered with another part, and therefore I did not have to adjust any of the envelops, I will however give the character a stress test and I may then need to adjust some of the envelopes.