I first started off animating by tinkering around with the ROBLOX Studio plugin; Moon Animator. I decided to make the Fortnite Default Dance as a joke with one of my friends, using a video of the dance as a reference. Around this time, I was playing the ROBLOX experience RoBeats, which featured Emotes that you could play to show off your character dancing. This inspired me to make an emote, and using my experience from making the Default Dance, I decided to remake the Mannrobics taunt from Team Fortress 2 in hopes of it getting into RoBeats.
To my surprise, the developer of RoBeats happily accepted my emote which motivated me further to remake more dances. I remade the Club Penguin, Kazotsky Kick, Smug Dance, and with every further animation I made, I experimented using different tools and tricks to help me animate.
Later on, I started experimenting making original dances for RoBeats which would trigger when you missed a note in game. I experimented different ideas like a failed backflip, dying from raging, and even shattering into dozens of pieces! By this time, I had started to build a strong discipline to animating, even committing and spending more than a month on dances such as shattered, and springy.
Eventually, I started working on custom commissions and was introduced to new rigs other than just the R15 Dummy. My first challenge was creating an emote of an R15 Dummy inside of a little toy car, reimagining a Fortnite emote. I challenged myself to make the emote as visually stunning as possible while also trying to balance the amount of time I spent on each animation so that my clients and myself would be satisfied with the result.
I continued to sharpen and improve my animating skills as time went on. I also started learning how to manage my time, as previously, I had as much time as possible to work on animations., but since I was working on commissions now I had a set dead line for animations. This made me start to get smarter about how I spend my time animating, and at this point, Moon Animator was not a wise choice for animating.
At this point, I started to feel like Moon Animator was holding me back from animating. This caused me to start experimenting with Blender, as I knew there was a way to create animations in Blender and export them into ROBLOX. More importantly, Blender was more efficient for animating, and had more tools so that I could create animations exactly as I envisioned.
I first challenged myself with Blender by creating another emote since I was already familiar with making them. I slowly started making use of tools provided by Blender, like Inverse Kinematics, Graph Editor, and Motion Paths in order to be more efficient and to output a better looking animation.
I found out that using Moon Animator early on was a blessing in disguise, since the limited tools provided to me meant that I had to work harder in order to get a smoother animation, giving me a more in depth knowledge of animation principles like timing, exaggeration, and anticipation.
I continue to use Blender to animate, with more and more experience to confidently use custom rigs, exaggerate movement, and efficiently create animations.
