Breathe Cycle 01

                   For my breathe cycle I began with thoughts of the character being fairly out of breathe from moving around a lot and interacting with it's environment, as if this is for a game then there wont be many points were the character isn't constantly moving. This made me create the animation with exaggerated breathing movement, as one of the principles of animation is to exaggerate your movements and poses to better allow the player or viewer to understand the character.

I began by moving, posing and setting a key at frame 01 for where i would imagine the cycle pose to begin and end. I chose it to be the pinnacle of the breathing inwards, and so the character would be expanding its stomach and chest, and arching its spine and shoulders / clavicles. I then selected all the control curves, middle click and dragged on frame one to 24 then saved a key there so that both the 24th and 1st frame shared the same values. Then I moved to the 12th frame and posed out the outward breath. I set the tangent type to spline so that the frames eased in and out of their values, better creating an arc from one pose to another because humans move in arcs rather than in a linear fashion such as mechanical or robotic things.

I noticed the arms of my character were twinning their movements, so i changed one of them to have a greater follow through. I rotated all the spine controls together so they 'compressed' the chest and skull to simulate breathing outwards, I noticed that it wasn't quite looking natural though because they all moved at the same time. So i moved their keyframes one or two apart from each other to allow them to overlap one another.

After tweaking the movements I noticed the transition from frame 24 to frame 01 was jerking, I discovered it was because the out tangent for frame 1 and the in tangent for frame 24 were very sharp in their angles. To smooth them out and allow a proper transition between the start and end of the cycle i selected the tangents and set the respective in and out values to flat tangents.

Spline Tangent

Flat Tangent

I noticed that the whole animation was just a few frames too fast for breathing naturally, even if they were exaggerated motions. To remedy this all i did was place a few frames in between set poses, thus extending the time that character had to move into position.

As another way to find errors in the animation i turned off the lighting to see only the silhouette. In doing so I noticed the character's left elbow stayed fairly rigid throughout the whole animation, so I went back into the animation and gave it rotations.

Here is a playblast of the animation so far: