I thought about doing a cat interacting with a box but after playing around with the rig, it would be very hard to achieve without breaking some parts of the rig. In the end I decided to create a cat nuzzling past the box.
I used my parents cat for reference again this time because she always nuzzles against most surfaces. The main thing that I noticed was that when they nuzzle against things, their whole body goes against the thing they are nuzzling. I tired to get this across.
I put in the key poses first to try and get a main idea about how the cat would interact. Below are a couple of key poses to get an idea of how the cat will act
I wanted to have the whole body leaning up against the box even when the cat was walking along.
This is the cat face nuzzling against the box. The cat is pushing its whole front of the body into pushing the face against the box.
There was mainly walking in this shot but because the box was in the way, the walk had to adjust to a change of path. It also had to have its weight shifted against the box.
The main troubles I had with this were animating the tail because the controls are not very good to get a flick. If I were to do the rig again I would not use the spline IK handle tool, even though most books and riggers recommend it for tails and spines etc, in this case i needed more control over the tail which this IK did not give me and became very frustrating. The other issue I had was sipping in the feet. As the cat was walking I kept having to adjust the feet so they would not slip. Whenever I adjusted the feet at one point or moved the body to get rid of the slipping, it would effect it somewhere else. I mainly used the graph editor to rectify the issue but no matter how hard I tried, there was still some slipping. I tried to make it as unnoticeable as possible.
Here are the play blasts of my interaction animation.
I tried to pick the best angle to show the body against the box and the face nuzzling. This was then rendered out.
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