These are the final results for the animations themselves. If I had longer to work on them then I would in theory have changed a few things.
To start off I would have re rigged the legs, as shown in the idle animation/cycle they don’t bend the correct way, if I had to guess why this is, I’d probably say that I rigged them the incorrect direction henceforth making it so that the legs/joints bent in the wrong way. I really wish that I fixed this as it caused more issues than expected.
Next I wish I was able to actually import my model without maya crashing. As I feel like I would have had a lot more freedom with the animation / cycles as the character that I had already made had a backstory already and is a character I am much more familiar with. For example one of the original ideas was her playing with her cube similar to how Mei plays with snowball in overwatch. I had also thought of an idle animation similar to that of Moira’s sitting emote, the model would sit crossed legged and solve bits and pieces of the puzzle cube slowly unlocking more and more, but never fully unlocking it as the animation on the cube would cycle. This main issue arriving at the beginning of the module partially feels as though is one of the main things that limited my creativity as instead of this heavily fleshed out character I had a basic joe template that I had to try and construct an interesting story around.
Although I had these issues I still felt I did a good job with a majority of the rigging as well as the weight painting, even though it was my first time attempting both.
Another thing I would have changed if I had more time would have been the use of animation techniques within the animations themselves. As there were multiple times where I could have used techniques such as squash and stretch within the animation but decided against it to try and save time.
I would have also have preferred the animations, if I had painted the model instead of leaving it blank. If I had done this I might have had more creativity on the animations themselves but every time I attempted it, either Maya didn’t recall that I painted it or the software itself would crash normally causing me to lose more progress than just the paint scheme that I had made.