Idle pose - Part 1

Continuing on from the theme from the walk cycle, I wanted to make the idle pose powerful. For this, I did some research into dominant body language, and found  an article on Changing Minds which provides a good starting point. Giving off dominant body language mainly involves open stances, which take up as much space as possible. It can also be done by doing the following things:

• Making the body as high as possible to give attack advantage.
• Putting hands on hips, as it makes the elbows go wide and make the body seem larger.
• Putting the chin up and thrusting the chest out.
• Placing legs apart to increase the size taken up.
• Using prolonged, unblinking eye contact.

See the image of Wonder Woman from Forbes on the right, as it gives a good example of a dominant stance.

For my animation I followed all of the above advice, and then made him rock from one foot to another, as if he was waiting for something to happen. I did this because if it was imported into a game engine it would look more natural, as if waiting for the player's input.

Creating the idle animation was quite easy, as it didn't involve any foot movement. In order to get the feet to stay in place, I used Planted keyframes in the biped menu; this made a big difference from the walk cycle. From there, I set the key poses at frames 50, 100, 150 and 200. After these key frames were set, I smoothed out the curves in the biped Workbench.

Although the animation was looking good at this point, I decided that I needed to add some flare to it to make it interesting. I started by using my Face Morpher to flare his nose in and out, to look as if he was breathing. From there, I made his eyes squint a little bit as he scratched his nose and flared his nostrils even more as he did this. I then made him look left to right and then back again through the timeline, as if he was scouting the area; to add to this, I gave the head a subtle rotation to follow the eyes.