Learning rigging and animation in Blender

Hello and welcome to my rigging and animation journey in Blender!

I've been learning Blender over the summer and wanted to try my hand at rigging and animating a character. With encouragement from my lovely friend, I decided to model this highland cow character, taking inspiration from the Animal Crossing character models. I've hardly modeled characters before so this was a fun challenge to make this highland cow and absolutely loved how they turned out.

I have watched several helpful tutorials online when it came to the rigging and animating, learning how to make the skeleton from scratch, using tools like Rigify to help create the rig and many more vids showing the breakdown of the animation timelines, controllers and whatever else I was unsure of.

As soon as I got the character moving, I just had fun with it! First thing I did was a headbang animation because it brought me alotta joy and was very cute. Then practiced simple character animations you would typically see for characters, like an idle, walking and waving one. I plan to recreate some animations you see villagers do in animal crossing for some good practice, but before that I'm learning how to texture in Blender so that my character isn't just the base model.

I have been dabbling in Unity to test out the different animations and have had alotta fun relearning how to move the character and trigger certain animations. I plan on updating this post as I go along this journey and keep sharing the different things I'm doing and trying out. It has been so gratifying so far, learning new skills and programs and fooling around in Unity again.

I hope y'all enjoy the ride! ^_^