Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Addressed Feedback

I tried to address the feedback I was given and speed it up a smidge, here's the result:

My Push&Pull project, half finished....

Someone recently reminded me of a project left half finished.  When I realised I lacked fundamentally in creature work I stopped all else and concentrated on creature body mechanics etc

So I stopped this character project where I was just playing about with push and pull poses and frustration in general.   These blocking frames were as far as I got, so here's some stills:

and just for fun, here's all of that stitched together for one superspeed package delivery....

Next time I have a break in between jobs I'll definitely try and finish it, it's a bit long for a test piece, it's more the length of a short me thinks.

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Clean-up and a bit of secondary animation and Feedback!

So I think I've pushed the basic cycle as far as I'm going to, some of the blendshapes for the rig aren't right for the exaggeration I was trying to create in the shoulder muscles but it brakes the rig.
I've added some secondary animation (would of loved to have the jaw open and tongue flailing in the wind but for this rig currently there are no facial controls).

Next up, I'm going to try and bring some character to him!

Some feeback I received for this was the following, with which I'm going to try and address for next time:

• his back looks a little too bendy, probably more from the shoulders rather than his hip..
• head might read better a little lower when his front legs are coming forward..
• also his rear legs if you bring them forward on the contact to nearer the shoulders, where they are they look like a hop rather than a push..
• front legs are feeling good, maybe offset one a little more so they hit the ground further apart..
  

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Blocking 2

So the hind legs were working out to be a bit of a mess, and after many passes of trying to fix it so that I could save all the nice stuff I liked, I broke all the connections and zeroed it out.  So then I just had the front legs going and all the body motion, from looking at it in this layered manner, I figured out when my hind leg footfalls should be and first off did both hind legs as one like this:

Then I offset one of the legs by just a smidge, as I've been seeing in a lot of reference footage it almost looks like a Doberman is using both his legs synchronized, but there is in fact the slightest offset.  And hopefully I can start finessing it tomorrow: