Custom animations - Salute

The salute animation is designed to come from the idle guard duty pose. It's supposed to depict that maybe a superior NPC walked past and he suddenly had to show respect. It is more of an informal or tribal salute rather than a military style head salute.

The first part of the salute to be animated was the hand beating on the chest.

I created this first with just one hit, but I wanted really to hit twice, so I used the graph editor to extend the time the arm was up for, then added the extra animation frames.

I made his head raise up in respect and straightened out the pose to be less relaxed.

I animated the foot stamping down at high speed. I adjusted the curve in the graph editor to make this movement more sharp like a stamp.

The final animation can be seen here: