Slow Dog Walk - Animation Reference

I was struggling with a dog walk in my short so I thought it best to try to find some live action reference and rotoscope it.  When a dog walks slower its feet spend much more time on the ground than in the air, so the contact pose is not the same as the lift off pose as it might be in say a fast 9-frame stride cycle where both front feet might only be on the ground together for just one frame.

On a 15-frames/stride cycle it seems that both front feet are on the ground together for 3-5 frames, and both back feet are on the ground together for 5-7 frames.  In this way the feet spend roughly the same amount of time in the air if the dog is walking fast or slow (around 5-7 frames in the air).  When a walk slows up, the dog takes smaller steps and spends more time with its feet on the ground.  Hence...

F per stride	F on the ground	F in the air	F both feet on the ground
9	~4-5	~4-5	~1
12	~6-8	~5	~2 (front) ~3 (back)
15	~8-10	~5-7	3-5 (front) 5-7 (back)

If you leave the feet hanging round in the air too long the walk starts to look stiff, like the dog is stuffed and artificially held in pose.  Remember the dog 'weighs' something and it needs to drop that leg to support itself on.

Here's some rotoscoping I did on a 15 frames/stride cycle.  I then adapted the the walk to a 17 frames/stride cycle which divides up much easier for 2D animators who don't have the computer to in-between on 5ths and 3rds.

Quaternion Beziers in the 3D View

Quaternions might have great benefits for key-framing rotation (no gimbal lock and so on) , but I have to admit that when it comes to the 2D graph editor I don't stand a change of working out what effect of grabbing the handle of a key on a Quat's W channel will have on my animation.  Generally I'll adjust the key in the 3D view and leave the bezier handles well alone set to auto (or vector if I want a snap) because independently changing any of the W, X, Y, or Z channels is unlikely to yield any great improvements for my animation!

Today I expanded my add-on to draw the handles for Quaternion and Euler rotations, and to show the path of the tail of the bone (which is probably what we want to track when we're adjusting rotations).  The timeslide tool still works but I need to do a little more coding (and get my head around what a normalized quat is) before grabbing the bezier handles in the 3D view is possible.

EDIT: http://www.pasteall.org/19807/python - now with quaternion and euler editing!  Editing preview shown below.  At 1500 lines it outweighs the mushroomer, the crowd sim and the autowalker as my new biggest project... not bad for 3 days coding!