A lot of good ideas came to mind and in the end I chose the one I see as a challenge, as I never animated a creature, and as an achievable project. When looking through animation mentors’ instagram page I saw an animation from a student showcase from 2019, by Leandro Adeonato.

My idea is based on this animation, in which i’ll be using ninja as a fighter and the Raptor rig from resource share.

Sinopse:

A curious ninja investagtes an ancient fight ring but suddendly the presence of a raptor surprises him and they both will fight until the ninja defeats it with great effort. When celebrating the mother Raptor appears, scared, the ninja releases a high pitched scream and runs away like a child.

The rigs I intend to use are:

Ninja, by

Raptor, by

At first I wanted to use the t-rex rig, as it is more realistic, but I’ve decided to use raptor as it is more cartoony and I want to represent a baby creature and cartoony styles have a wider range of possibility regarding expressions and movement. I went on to test the rigs and noticed that the textures for raptor are not being assigned and I can’t really fix the problem or understand whats wrong. Time to ask for help!

Building up master scene

For some reason, I’ve always liked green environments, wild with bones and somehow misterious. So my idea for the master scene would be in a wild place, like an exotic forest where the ninja is exploring an ancient fight ring, so I thought about rib bones around the fight ring and a stone tilled floor surrounded by torches and iluminated by fire.

The light source being fire might be a bit too hard to do and it is not decided yet. I do want a dark environment with strong shadows. I made a quick sketch of what I want the environment to look like:

Assets:

• stone tilled floor
• bone ribs
• exotic trees
• rocks
• bushes
• variety of plants
• torches
• ninja rig
• raptor rig 2x

From this list the only thing missing is the stone tilled floor and the torches. All my assets were downloaded from turbo squid and free3D.

Variety of plants:

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Rocks:

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Rib Bone structure:

When searching for this model nothing seemed to work, until I found a t-rex skeleton rig which worked perfectly for what I wanted, I removed the controls and kept the mesh.

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I realised the ribs were to close to select the faces of each piece of geometry so I deleted face by face, duplicating the bones I wanted.

Master Scene:

After setting up the master scene I downloaded an hdri from HDRIHaven website and did some render tests. I did get some issues with the lights and reflections but I was able o have a better idea of what it will look like. The stone tilled floor will be modeled in maya and zBrush.

Test Render Master Scene:

This weeks blog is about the previs for the final major project, something I’ve been struggling for a while due to my indecisiveness regarding the idea and script. Nothing really seems good or exciting enough so, I took some time to think and explore my possibilities considering the time we have to write a thesis and create a project. I tend to be overambitous but I don’t think I can afford to take such a risk now.

When I first thought about what i wanted to do for the final major project what came to mind first was either a dragon or any other creature that does not exist, the fact that I wanted to gather reference and learn how to put together so many diferent movements from different animals. Super exciting.

I found a really cool rig, blurgha. I can’t even say what does that rig look like, it is extremelly complex. I got a meeting with luke where he advised me to make lots of animation tests as well as test the rigs before start animating. So I did, also grabbed a dragon rig and made tests on it too.

Dragon:

Blurgha:

The first one I tested was blurgha, I wanted to make a small walkcycle but honestly I was having too much trouble understanding how that body structure worked, so I chose to make a punch, as it has such strong arms.

I looked up references from lizards, gorilas, frogs, crocodiles and orangutans. Some of these helped me understand it all a bit better but nothing concrete. Anyway, this is what the first test looked like:

Of course, it is still a very rough and raw animation but I got to know a bit of this character and how it moves. The weight is also an important detail as it is so big, can’t really be fast and there has to be a lot of overlapping action mostly in his upper body parts, belly etc…

Another thing that I tried to improve was the camera movement, it is important to give some relevance to weight and reality to the shot, even as a test.

After this, I went to test the dragon and made a small step also to understand how that creature moves as it has no arms but has wings which are sort of like an arm but with a different and much more limited movement. The hips also have a different way to move as it is more similiar to a bird.

I looked up reference footage from ostrich, snakes, chicken, eagles as well as game of thrones dragon shots and lord of the rings. Dragons have been something that one sees more and more on movies and tv series so there is actually a whole lot more to look at regarding reference footage. Of course, an animator must never copy the work of another artist but it doesn’t hurt to see how they did it and how they got to it.

I really wanted to show the dragon test but for some reason I have lost the data, on the maya scene where i did the test there is a problem with the model and the animaton waas lost. I will continue to try and solve this issua as soon as possible.

Along with testing and trying to animate something roughly I went looking for animators that specialize on creature animation and I found an artist called Daniel Fotheringham. He has worked for movies such as the hobbit (dragon animation) as well as game of thrones, the lion king, among others. I was impressed by his work and the way he gave some good tips on how to begin understanding and what tools could be helpfull to improve producivity and technique.

This video was a great way to understand some ways to animate creatures, one of the tips he mentioned was animation layers, short animation tests like the paw hitting the floor or a simple movement of the head. Small things that if improved on a simple test can become much easier to do when actually animating.

After watching the master class I did some research on animation layers as I had never really payed a lot of atention to it. A mistake of course, it is usefull in so many ways. I did use animation layers in my tests included in this post. The ability to animate on top of something you did on another layer without any problem or have some keys on a control out of your way, is extremelly helpfull.