Crouch cycle - Part 1

Whilst researching ways to make my character crouch I didn't come across a lot of results, nor had I read anything about crouching in the past. I therefore started by thinking about the kind of pose I wanted him to crouch into, and found images of Lara Croft and Superman crouching, as I see them as powerful characters. The kind of pose I wanted to create involved having one hand on the ground with one knee in the air.

In order to get an idea of how a normal person would get into this pose, I decided to film myself doing it in slow motion. I filmed once from the side and once from the front, as this would give me a good idea of limb positions.

This animation was different than the others, in that the foot positioning was affected on a world axis rather than locally, so the feet would stay planted in place as he moves. I actually found that this made it easier to animate because I didn't have to rely on copying and pasting poses into new positions, but rather making it on-the-fly.

I felt that there were three major issues with the crouching animation at this point:

• The arm movement wasn't very smooth, and it made them look quite robotic.
• There was a point as he stood up where he wouldn't be able to balance in reality.
• The skinning on the neck was broken.

The arm movement was simple to fix, as it just involved smoothing out the curves in the graph editor even more and giving them a wider arc as he got up. To make his balance better as he stood up, I moved the position of his left foot forwards and delayed his back-stride until he was fully upright.

The skinning on the neck was the hardest fix, as I didn't want to adjust it for one specific animation, and then have it look unnatural on other animations. In the end I adjusted the vertex weighting to make it look good, and then tilted the spine back slightly to perfect it.

I also decided to raise his eyebrows as he crouches, giving him a better view ahead, and also made him blink as he goes down.