So, here's the deal, the reverse skeleton controls are a bust as far as I'm concerned, and while they largely improve the subtle animation quality of the model and leave me with less work overall, I can't achieve the desired effect, it's simply breaking the model at the end of the process.
Not wanting to waste our discussion of controls, I've decided to add a few in choice places, while keeping their purpose very simple. Ultimately, the point of controllers is to let the animator know "These are the parts of the model to touch, ignore everything else" and while I haven't done a good enough job to say that I could hand this off to an animator, these controls should hopefully help me out. If not, I may even get rid of some of them, and purely make use of IK handles and even the base skeleton pieces to animate, though that, while doable, will be a much more painstaking process.
I have to admit here I'm hitting the edge of my knowledge on the topic of rigging, so I'm moving forward into animation and just giving myself adequate enough controls for each major part of the model. I'm not going to go through the exact process as most of the content is not different from last update, but just know that for the eyes, I used a somewhat new but very simple technique.
For objects like eyes which should move together, you may create a LF and RT controller, then create a third 'parent' controller usually wrapping around them. Once you've individually set your constraints between the appropriate controllers and joints, the parent controller, with no constraint of its own, will affect both the child controllers equally. This is mostly important for facial rigging, but good to be aware of.
So, we're ready to animate... Except, that's a huge step, and we've only been working in a single scene so far. At this point, for every single animation we make, we're going to save a new scene with our model in its default position, separate from this animation-ready file state. We want to preserve this in case anything goes wrong down the line. So, let's save this scene, and then save a few new scenes which we'll call:
"The Horror_idle"
"The Horror_crouch"
"The Horror_crouchIdle"
"The Horror_forwardWalk"
"The Horror_backWalk"
"The Horror_forwardDash"
"The Horror_backDash"
"The Horror_forwardJump"
"The Horror_backJump"
These are likely all the basic movement options our character will have. We won't touch on attacks, blocks, or hurt animations because as you can see we already have our hands full just with the basic animation states. Each of these animations should branch from the idle pose, and while they don't need to be perfectly smooth, we want enough connection between most animations that the player does not lose the visual clarity of the character. Since we're not dealing with combat animations as well, we don't have to consider frame data just yet. I'll be taking these one at a time and documenting my progress and end results on each. I may go back and rework some depending on my satisfaction with the results, but from this point on we'll be moving forward at a more brisk pace, other than our initial introduction of the animation and keyframe systems. So, ready? Here's the first frame of our idle animation, the bedrock of the character's animation states, The Horror is ready to fight!
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