Spinning Bird Kick

The final action I am animating is the spinning bird kick.

Reference


This is proving to be really quite difficult. The problem is that there is so much rotation and transformation going into the kick that blending into this action is tricky and can look quite out of place. Unfortunately it would be very difficult to key-frame this transition myself as when repeating the action in the NLA editor the transition would also be repeated which is not what I want.

Another problem is Blender's rotation system. When rotating over 180 degrees, Blender will automatically take the shortest route, this becomes a problem when you want constant rotation above 180. To correct this I have rotated 2 times at 179 degrees instead of 180 and then repeated the action, this way Chun li still rotates through all 360.

In addition to this animations tend to slow down near the keyframes and when animating constant rotation this is not necessarily desired. To correct this I have used the IPO curve editor and selected Linear interpolation for the keyframes in this action.

I have placed the spinning bird kick in my sequence and used another stance and bow actions to complete it. From here I just need to fine tune the animation as best I can to get everything looking smoother and more natural.