Cat jump

I have doing some more tests with Melvin the cat. I decided to try to animate him jumping onto a plinth. The reason I am doing this is because this nation has a lot of anticipation and secondary action with the tail. I thought it would be good to try and stretch my animation skills.

Firstly, I had to try and find some reference footage. I do not live with a cat and the cats that live around me tend to hind so my best source was YouTube. I found a good video with a cat called Maru jumping into a large box. It did not show me how cats would land on a plinth but it gave me good reference for how a cat would prepare to jump. Below is the video from YouTube.



For the landing, I used my parents cat and watched her as she climbed onto my parents windowsill. I didn't manage to catch it on video but she always is going up onto the windowsill so I managed to catch her quite a few times.

From this I was able to animate a jump scene. The only problems I had were to do with the shoulders, back legs and the tail, when they are pushed forward too far then they start to protrude out from the chest. When doing a jump though, there are parts when the cats shoulders are extremely forward especially mid jump when both pairs of legs are stretched out. The back legs had to be scrunched up when climbing onto the plinth and at some points, for a very short amount of time, the legs go inside the thigh. The hardest thing was the tail. The controls do not allow the tail to flick very easily so there were some parts where I wanted the tail to flick, but I couldn't get it to.

When I was finished, it was hard to see everything from one angle so I took some play blasts from different angles and then only rendered from one angle. This was because there are subtle movements like the bottom when the cat s about to jump. These may be missed if it is only seen from one angle.