Along with the idle animation, I remade this slam animation. There's several others I haven't even started on, gotta get those done too, but today I'm talking about this one.

This boss has an attack that telegraphs for 6 frames before crashing down their front-leg and launching shockwave projectiles across the ground for you to jump over. The first animation was made without that timing in mind, with the idea of just gouging out frames to fit the timing, because I didn't know the timing when I started. This time however, I knew the timing, and it's unfortunately pretty sparse.

Unlike the idle animation, I scrapped most of the keyframes and started from scratch, with the exception of the keyframes on frame 0. I tried to break a habit by not going completely straight ahead. First, I put my playhead on frame 5, and posed the body so that his front-and-forward leg was as far up as the armature would allow, and posed the tail to sway less. I didn't manually pose the other three legs at all, but the IK inevitably rotates them anyway.

Then, the immediate frame after, I keyframed every part of the body to be completely prone. Not just the leg back onto the ground, but the nose to the tail all sprawled out. Then, I moved the keyframes around in the timeline so that the more distal parts of the body would lag behind. Also pushed back the "high" keyframes back by one each, because 1 frame was too fast. However, once I got this sprawled out motion down, I went back to my old habits and frame-by-frame animated the torso, hips, legs, and head back to the idle pose, which is frame 0. Not much too it, but this did allow me to shake the body, and communicate a kind of senescence. I did eventually copy/paste the frame 0 keyframes and put them at the end of the animation and adjust the keyframes one or two frames before them to compensate for my predictions, but they were mostly accurate, which is surprising even to me.