Risky Baseball - Joe's Rig Test

Joe's rig test. I owe the walk cycle charts and timing to Eric Larson and Milt Kahl, so I wish you'd appreciate it when it comes around. I modified it a little, but basically, it is the same strut of arrogance and overconfidence that Casey, from Casey at the Bat (1947) had walking to the plate. Joe's bat's name is Black Betsy. Video below, rig is absolutely raw at this state, with no corrective blendshapes or PSD's. In case you wonder why he is in his shorts, the uniform is nCloth, and while I have some settings arranged, the model's rig test was to be bare to see weighting problems easier. The tangents are still in linear, and I sped up the end in the interest of time, but it's looking really good for good ol' Joe that he'll get to play baseball again.
Think he's proud enough?

Bored.

Roughs of what I sit around doing while others are making me wait. Don't get excited about it, the tangents are still in step.
Two guys juggling sounds pretty simple. After all, it's a repeater, right? Well, kinda. It's constantly throwing and catching, mostly everything is in "figure eights." To break up the pattern a little bit, I modified a vibration formula- you make two patterns of action, and then you interleave them together in different combinations. It's an old trick. Tracking the pins was the challenge. I decided to animate them the old fashioned way too. The cheat would be to use a script or expressions for the rotation. Nothing in nature is going to act that perfectly. The thumbnails for the motion of the pins, if you're into how I got them to move with the spin in Maya.

I needed a way for this rat to zip around looking for whatever before he snatches this piece of cheese from the trap. First instinct is to inbetween it the "regular" way- using exaggerated squash and stretch frames and a couple of other tricks. But you run into problems immediately. There is not enough time for anticipation, the turn takes too long, you can't read the accent before the transition, you don't get the zipping around visual... So Tex Avery back in the day was experimenting with a three drawing run with blur frames, and he had a character who zipped from one pose to the next. This idea was later built upon and evolved- Chuck Jones had his distorted version of transitional inbetweens (probably one of the more famous). So I spent a couple of weeks dissecting Tex Avery's formula- 5 frame virtual hold on the accent with a cushion back, using three blurs (combining the anticipation, the inbetweens, and the follow through).