The Gramophone Rendered

Project for presentation.

The Gramophone from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Final preview

This is the final preview before I start rendering the movie all in full detail. Rendering all of these frames this will take a very long time.
Final Preview from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Rusty introduction

I have animated Rusty doing an introduction to Enginuity. I plan to make working gears on the logo just to add something engineering to the intro.
Rusty Introduction from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Rusty Walk Cycle Test

I have animated a walk cycle for Rusty using the dog walk cycle guide below. However, I didn't copy the entire movements. I made some changes in the walk in the hind legs as they supposed to be his disabled legs, thus I made the back leg movements more awkward. But I intend to not make it completely awkward as I aim to make it so that Rusty seems like he's used to walking in such a manner.

Rusty Walk Test from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Preview Animation

So I have finally animated the musical notes. Though there are still a few dodgy sequences here and there, I'm overall happy about the outcome. The project now just needs adjusting on a few animation parts and needs rendering.  Preview Animation from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

An attempt at rigging

This was quite a hefty thing for me as I have never rigged a 3D character before nor used any 3D rigging system, so I had to learn a lot about rigging to experiment with this.

Connected bones

First I used the bone tool to craft the bones closely proportionate to Rusty. I made sure to only use parts of the body where joints would meet. 

After assigning the bones to Rusty's skin, there was a problem with the envelopes. The skin of Rusty was distorted.

To attempt to fix this problem, I tried making the envelope smaller to fit the assigned joint. However this also did not work and on some envelopes there were red areas that could not be deselected no matter what I tried. I'm not sure why this is the case.

Re-rigging
After many unsuccessful attempts to fix the envelopes, I decided to recreate new bones that more accurately depict to Rusty.

Although this was much better, it still came with problems. No matter how I edited the envelopes, there was still an error in mesh.