Reference! Rig!

Getting this film to look right, as an animator, our own creature needed to look right when it's moving. We have no settled on a four legged creature. Before we get a model and rig to animate, me and Nick started to test some quad walk cycles on a free rig which I found called Nico.

I was just playing around with it, as I have never done quad walk cycles before to I needed to do some tests and get the feel of how it all works. This is a really basic test I did after some research, its not much and not great at all but i just wanted to play around with all the controls.



Update!

Okay so here is a render of our creature which Ollie has modeled and textured:

I'm really happy with it and cant wait to start animating it! Before all of this though, I need to get some ideas to how it will move, its personality and all of that stuff. I bought some books such as Animals in Motion by Edward Muybridge and some animation books such as 'timing for animation' and 'Cartoon Animation' by Preston Blair. These helped me see how four legged animals walk which i would then apply to our creature. As these things have arrived by a meteor and they have come from another planet, we figured that they would be quite intelligent to an extent, as it is rare that you see aliens who aren't more advance than us. (weaponry etc) We were going to have them quite clumsy but then decided that because of the intelligence, they should come across as confident and aggressive towards us.

As our creature is bases on a lion, human, gorilla and a crocodile, it was hard to distinguish what sort of walk, or even how this thing would move. All of the power comes from the huge front arms, but the back legs give it speed. I researched into quadruped walk cycles and got some ideas. I used lots of youtube videos as reference so that i could see how big cats walk, and even some animations which had been done of these creatures before.

The Rig!

Now that Sanjay has finished the rig, we can finally get started on working with it! Getting some tests done etc. Here are a few short tests I have done to get used to our new rig. I'm so excited to start working with this!

This was done with the third draft of our rig. The first and second has some slight problems with them, but we made sure we started this project early enough and got working really fast so that if things like this happened, we had time to fix them. I'm really pleased and happy with how the rig is now though. Let the animation begin!