COSC 3P98 - Animation
After our character had been rigged the next step was to begin creating his animation sequences. The main component that we needed for animation was a simple walk cycle. After creating the rig the walk was pretty simple because he's not a very advanced character and being a cartoony character his animation does not need to be overly realistic. To do this I merely had to pose the left arm and the right leg and then I copied the pose and pasted it in reverse to create a walk. Then when used in the animation the actions can be repeated by duplicating them in the NLA editor.
In addition to the character I also had to animate the movement of cameras and the visibility of the shield as well as switching between cameras at different points in the animation. The visibility of the shield was an interesting problem to try to animate. After reading various forum posts I ultimately discovered that I just had to right click the camera which controls whether the shield gets rendered and insert a key for the visibility and switch it off shortly afterwords. To switch the cameras I just had to insert markers for when there would be a camera change and then at that frame set the active camera and then select the menu option to bind the active camera to the selected marker. As for actually animating the cameras they can be animated like any other object so it was easy enough. To make sure the camera of his approach to earth followed any changes to our character precisely I attached it as an object located just under his foot facing down. This makes it so that any rotation and location changes made to our character are also applied to the camera.