Cubies: Week 7 - Scene 2 Complete

Hello, it's been a week since I last posted,
and what I've done since then is finish the second scene.

Here is the final playblast (this time the controls are hidden so it looks a lot more like the final result):



The work was done in three phases:
1. First I took care of the minor adjustments to the rig. That took a little less than a day of work to complete. Most of the work was repositioning the cubies in order for their position with the new rig will match the position of the cubies with the old rig in the first scene...

2. Planning the timing - this time I was a little more confident and didn't use the spreadsheet - I just put the major keyframes (every step, jump, etc) as guidelines for the animation.

3. Filling in the animation, step by step. Along the way I added a lot of pauses that were missing from the timing. Without pauses the action looks mechanic and the characters don't look like they are thinking.
The pauses were the hardest thing to animate in this scene, since a walk is a walk (plus, I've animated like 50 steps with this rig already and it gets easier and easier), and I also got used to the timing of the jumps, but staying still while looking alive is quite difficult.
If you move too little, the character looks frozen and not alive, and if you move too much during a pose, it looks like it is working mechanically without thinking, or just looks unnatural.