Pulsar Jump Animation WIP (Patreon)

Animation attached to this post.

I made this animation of Pulsar jumping over a log to test Pulsar's rig and procedural physics. I'm glad I did because I found several things broken with the rig that I need to fix. Overall though it's a big improvement from the last one. Unfortunately the physics are hard to get right.

Although I did some tests of procedural physics with his junk, they weren't very good. And I never bothered to implement collision so everything was clipping anyway. I ended up animating it by hand for this version to compare and.. yeah. That's the way to go for now. It's so much more flexible and detailed even if it takes longer.

I was able to use physics for his crest though, so that saved a bit of time. It takes a lot of tweaking but once it's dialed in I don't have to animate the entire shot by hand, so it helps out in the long run.

I'm not sure if I'm going to clean this one up or not. He still looks a little robotic because I didn't animate his face or some other details like fingers or the length of the tail feathers. I do really enjoy seeing Pulsar just moving and interacting with his environment in a casual way. So maybe I'll polish this one up just for practice, even though it's a single quick shot.