This week I kept working on my walkcycle and have my final idea approved and discussed with the tutor. I kept animating and improving my animation, made another playblast and realised there was still a lot of things wrong and I keep trying to get ahead of myself. Time management is key in these sorts of important projects and deadlines.

Referencing was always something a bit tricky for me to understand, but honestly the best way to get that out of your list of problems is to stop being afraid and try it. So Raptor was my guinea pig and it went well, as I knew the theory behind it all.

Another thing I keep trying to find is a name for my character, Alan came up with ralph the raptor and it’s getting in my head. But I do need to see more of what I can do animation related in order to give him a good name.

Playblast 3:

This one was after I finished the tail experiments and changed the arms as they did not look natural, they needed to be more loose. I keep trying to improve the animation I have without finishing the blocking of it all. All of these controls and extra limbs and controls that need to be animated too are getting in the way of my comprehension of its body. The same happened last year when we started animating humanoids.

Good reference is key to increase producivity and I haven’t trully figured out how to properly get it with creature animation.

My final idea is:

Ralph, the raptor takes 3 steps forward and stops, sniffing the air to the right and left. When turning left a high speed ball is thrown in the raptors snout and it hits him hard, still dizzy and getting angry he looks around, grabs the ball and throws it but it is pierced by his nail. Looks in the direction in which the ball was thrown frustrated with the pierced ball.

This idea was discussed with Alan and now I do look at it as a more doable project, not as impossible as my previous ideas. The ball animation is one of the tricky parts, it will be done initially with just a ball mesh and animate it as a reference and use alembic cache to reduce project weight. I might get a rigged ball or even rig one myself for this purpose.

Environment:

This all started with a master scene, that is not going to be used, at least in this project. I did consider using no environment at all, but that is a risk that I don’t think I want to take at this stage of my project.

As we all hear in this industry: “less is more” and this project has to be one of my best for the showreel. I will invest in quality.

Playblast 4:

This was a test to see if I could do the sniffing the air part and getting the spine fixed, but it looks super weird. My methods will need a change.

Last week I did build a master scene and got my idea for the final project straight (so I thought) and was trully proud of it. It was exactly how I imagined my master scene to look like. Although I tend to spend too much time on details that end up unused because ideas are constantly changing and this industry suffers a lot from this.

We had our first class from term 4, I did go to the term 1 class as I was so excited and luke asked me to go there and introduce myself and perhaps give them some advice on the course. It was exciting to see all those students in the same spot I was last year, the nostalgia of it makes me love this course even more. Anyway, it was amazing to be back in the building along with all the energy of the new academic year.

I spoke to one of our new tutors, Alan, and it was very helpfull as it made me see that I was doing to much, over ambitious… again. So all my script and story suffered some changes. Alan asked me what was my goal with this project: Creature Animation.

Based on this, I should really just focus on that. We don’t have that much time to finish everything, so it’s better to have a good animation that a big unfinished one. I took two ideas home: animation with an object and animation to express the personality of the character – the interpretation of an animator towards a character. What do I see in it?

When we had the first class with Nigel, one of the slides of his presentation said exactly what I was supposed to do when trying to show the personality of a character.

I stuck with the raptor rig, and before any major decisions or changes in the script I tested the rigs. Raptor had a lot of issues, like one of the feet did not have a control, the knee control was almost inside the skin of the character and the textures were not being recognized.

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As I know nothing about rigging I reached Kamil and he fixed the rig for me and sort of saved my project. I really want to use this rig, his expression is something I believe I can work well with.

Script Changes:

My first thought was to do about 2 or 4 shots, 2 with an interaction with an object and 2 without. After a bit of thought I decided I could do one shot with a good polished animation, with and without an object.

That was something I wanted to discuss with Alan before making more work that will not be used and kept on testing my rig. The basic walkcycle was my choice, but not basic at all. It is so much harder than a humanoid character, there is not a perfect reference for it, which also makes it interesting and a good challenge.

The reference I looked up was from ostrich, meerkat, pigeon, even raptors, to see how some animators got to it and understood their movement.

Playblast 1:

A lot of overlapping is involved in this sorts of animation, plus the fact that is a cartoony style rig, so more pressure on that matter. I did try to block all, but I always end up doing everything by steps (1st the hip and legs, 2nd spine and neck, 3rd arms). The tail was also something I did spend a lot of time to understand as there are so many animals that move it differently.

Playblast 2:

This 2nd playblast was just an adjustment to the neck and spine.

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.