Row row row your boat.

Now that I am animating a rower, I once again chose a starting pose for the rower using the videos as a reference. For the starting pose, I chose to have the legs at their most bent and the arms out stretched as this would be easiest to animate.








Once I was happy with the pose, I moved up the timeline 20 frames and created a middle pose (which is pretty much the pose that is half way though a cycle) where the legs were this time extended and the arms bent.









From here on in, it was just a case of filling in the blanks between the poses. It was quite useful that blender does most of the work when filling in the animation between keyframes, but there was still some tinkering to be done in aligning the position of the hands and wrists so that they follow a straight line instead of wobbling up and down.

There were several problems with the weight painting I came across while animating the rower, such as the balance bone having some vertices assigned to it. As a result, when I would drag the bones in the torso back and forth to simulate the rowing stroke, some vertices would be pulled out of positon do to the balance bone pulling on them. I managed to assign the vertices to the hip bone instead to get around this proble.

As with the running animation, the pose in the first frame of the animation was copied and pasted to form the last frame, although it did not need to be flipped. The animation was also lengthened to 240 frames using the action editor.