I Have No Skills But I Must Animate

so, I've been doing absolutely terribly in Maya. I've never een humbled by a piece of software before to this degree for so long. Aspects of 3D modeling which I'd expect to be relatively simple are painstakingly tedious and obnoxious. Yet, animation is largely easy for me.

Seriously. the first tutorial we did was the animated solar system,which I found only lightly tedious and partly fun. that was a nice tutorial. This time, however, I had to animate this:

So, when I first started to try this tutorial, I expected to have even more problems. after all, I had trouble simply putting things together-- let alone having them move around. Oddly enough, though, I found this particular tutorial incredibly straightforward and somewhat easy. Mind you, when it came to exporting the poses as an animation file to create a .gif, I totally forgot how to do so since it'd been well over a month since I did anything regarding that and the tutorial didn't outright detail how to do it again. so, there is that. Barring that, though, the thing animated well, and I was even able to move my keyframes around in the graph editor. Here are the poses I screen-capped for posterity:

With this tutorial I learned a lot about how to map joints together and mapping skeletons to geometric shapes. I also learned that up-and-down motions also have to be animated unless the character runs in such a way which prevents head-bobbing. I actually found this fairly entertaining and enjoyable... probably because I didn't have to mess with the graphics. Maybe I'm better with the animation back-end than the visual attributes? What does that say about my graphic design prowess? I ma have to lay down for a while.