Escape Studios: Creature Performance

     

Planning:

The task was to create a creature performance within around 2 weeks.

As I wanted to practice using various live action reference to piece together a shot, I went for a realistic VFX style approach for the animation.

To decide what animal I would animate, I trialed several creature rigs with pose testing. In the end I chose a dog, as Truong's ZBrush dog rig felt really comfortable to work with, due to the variety of controls.

Some of the Pose Tests

In order to keep the story simple so I could focus more on studying dog locomotion, I picked the simple concept of a playful dog fetching a ball.

I had a rough idea of the general motions I wanted, so searched and gathered reference online that roughly matched what I imagined (using dogs of a similar build to the rig). By doing this first, I was able to tweak my idea to include any cool movements I came across.
For example, when I came across a video of a dog who repeatedly fell over each time he fetched a stationary ball, I liked it so much I had to try and include it in the animation.

Storyboards/Animatic:

After feeling satisfied with my library of new reference, I picked out my favourite ones and edited them altogether with Adobe After Effects to create a video storyboard, roughly timing the scene.

To then get a better idea of my key poses, I would sketch them out in my notebook as little thumbnails.

Then to solidify my idea, I made a rough animatic in Adobe Photoshop based on the reference and thumbnail sketches. It also allowed me to explore ways to express the playfulness of the dog.

Block

Next step was to start Blocking. At this stage I mainly focused on getting the key poses from the Animatic in the scene.

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Near the end of the 1st pass of Blocking, I discovered that Truong had updated his dog rig with even more controls, which would become really helpful with overlapping.  However when transferring the animation from the old rig to the new rig, I noticed that the newer one had some model deformations.

I was thankfully able to contact the Truong, and ask if it was possible to fix them to behave similar to in the old rig. I would send screenshots of my block pass with both rigs aside each other, which helped reveal when and where the model would deform. Truong would then kindly update it and ask for more feedback, which ultimately led to fixing issues such as stretching the legs far out would change the volume of the torso.

The screenshots I sent of the deformations

For my 2nd pass of Blocking, I keyed at much closer intervals to help prepare for the Splining. I used the reference much more closely in this pass to build the shot.
Initially I thought the dog was going to run straight to the ball in a curved path, but this turned out to feel quite unatural after testing. I therefore decided to add in a slide to help the dog do a sharp turn after doing some reference research into Dog Agility.

The only reference I could find of a dog doing a slide on a sharp turn was in the clip above. Despite being blurry, it helped me adjust the shot for the 2nd Block Pass below.

Spline

In the 1st Pass of the Spline, wanted to only focus on the main controls, such as body, limbs and neck. Additionally I decided to cut off the tail in order to save time animating as the deadline drew closer.

Final Submission

The Final Submission is ultimately the 2nd Spline Pass, with a basic render in the Viewport. This is where I added details, such as animating the paws, ears and using jiggle controls to try and simulate muscles moving.

Here's the Final Submission along the main reference used