The time has come to confirm the Hexalum animation for shot02. It has been quite fun animating this guy and I admit, I maynot the best at taking criticism but I thank and appreciate everyone who did offer CC at every iteration so here is the signed off playblast.
Back track 2 months ago Kendrick put his hand up on taking the mammoth role of rigging. I don’t think he even realised how huge a role he signed himself into. There has been some dire days during the ordeal but seeing the development of where the Hexalum rig is at now, I must say I’m extremely impressed and his efforts! Second time working with Ken on a major project and I’m sure proud to have my characters rigged by him.
… only 7 days behind schedule and animation has finally started (for the Hexalum beast that is). That’s not to say that rigging isn’t over, but it’s at a stage where I can animate it without it breaking… too much.
So I started off attempting a walk/run cycle for the beast and I wanted to refer back to the white apes from John Carter (for the middle arms) and really, you don’t actually see them ‘charge’ as much as I initially thought (you still get a really good idea though – they have very similar timing to the main front arms). However, I just wanted to search for a better reference (wasn’t holding my luck) and I found this..
Definitely doesn’t apply as much as the white apes but I thought it was a good reference and a good place to start. I ran into a few issues with his arms as he tries to put them forward to gain ground, he can’t actually extend them out without it clashing into the horn mesh. But I was lucky enough to have already rigged the arms to have an elbow snap. Boy was this a life saver, really would not have been fun without the elbow snap. So here is one of my attempts at a walk (gallop) cycle trying to get a close run of how the beast would run in the shot and after receiving a little bit of feedback, he’s a little too ‘cute’ and happy, too free flowing, not heavy enough so that is what I’ll be trying to implement soon. (Of course more critiques are more then welcome.)
Quick update on the progress of the Hexalum.
The past week I’ve been working on getting the maps ready for the Hexalum. Testing out the normal and displacement maps in Arnold Rendering and now starting to paint the base textures in Zbrush and taking it further in Mari.
Ken has also been very busy and working extremely hard on the rig. I’m pretty damn impressed with the results of the rig and hopefully Ken can make a demo video of it in action!
Personally getting excited about animating the Hexalum beast and being very inspired by the Beans monster.
and the breakdown
There is also the obvious beast from Avatar as it is 6 legged: has some really good leaps that we can refer to
But as we were going for a Gorilla type of beast that happens to have 6 legs (arms) the beast from John Carter is much more relevant
There is definitely no sarcasm whatsoever in the title of this post haha. I think Damien has been working on the Hexalums retopo now for a few days and he’s going strong!
So whilst he’s loving this process he somehow had to procrastinate by concepting something that might be a little teaser into our next project.. (perhaps?)
Damiens really putting in the effort and man hours getting this beast looking supreme!
A skeleton drawn up by Damien so I could reference it when I rig the beast.
A screenshot of the controllers set up for the beast. Nothing too fancy just yet.
D I V E 