In Autodesk Maya we used characters with pre animations and rigs with inverse kinematics and forward kinematics.
Inverse kinematics is where you use the entire joint or part of the body so for example an arm
Forward kinematics is where you use some joints of the part namely the arms
First of all we went onto a website called (Adobe) Mixamo and the site provides pre rigged characters with animations however the model is separate from the rigged animations but you can choose the rigged animations onto a model.
In our exercise and R&D we had to create 6 different animations using pre rigged animations for the character models.
As reference my character model is Homer Simpson from the Simpsons. When playing the animations I was reminded of The Simpsons Hit and Run game from PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube.
Here are the animations I made:
Walking
Running
Jumping
Sneaking
Attacking
Dying
I used playblast (in Maya) to create the video.
Overall, this R&D process is useful and beneficial to the final process for the advanced animation assignment.