Baba Yaga rigging, skinning and animation

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Baba Yaga is a secondary part of the project. She is an additional part, I wanted to show the occupant of the house as well. I wanted her to work as a satellite for the house, so she flies around on the broomstick.
Her animation is less complicated than the house, so as the rig. I created a very simple human rig with additional bones for the hair and skirt, because I wanted the whole body to move slightly while flying.




















I did quick skinning because in this case, it was not crucial for me to deform all parts of the body correctly. I focused mostly on head, arms and legs since these deforms the most.



















The main part of the animation was to create a path that Baba Yaga can follow. I was trying to use a spline method where I can attach the model to the spline and make it follow the desired direction, however, I had a problem to make it with the skinned object that has bones inside. It was working perfectly fine for the model itself, but it did not work for the bones, which I still wanted to keep. I was not able to find an answer to how to do it online, so I had to come up with a solution. In this case, I decided to position the model in certain places and then rotate it to make it follow the right direction while recording the animation. This way I could create a motion path that Baba Yaga can follow while being able to animate certain parts of her body separately.
motion path
I was testing few different paths, one when she was just flying around, the second one she was ging around from the bottom to the top making it a bit longer than the house animation, but it was a bit too distracting. So after a few attempts, I come up with the idea to texted the animation time to 425 frames and make a first few seconds of the animation more static. So in the beginning, she just floats in the air patrolling the surroundings, and then quickly dives down, making her way between the chicken legs and then up finishing when she started. This way, I was able to make the animation dynamic and interesting but not too distracting at the same time. 

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