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May 12, 2007
lsgl: baby's first steps
by sven at 10:50 pm
Very long day. But I did what I set out to do: I got an Elder Thing to walk. Badly.
(Given the level of difficulty, "badly" was actually the plan.)
Here's what the Elder looks like while I'm animating it. It turns out that I won't be using the "Hot Dog on a Stick" model -- but color-coding the stuff that's ultimately going to be invisible has been a great boon.
The problem I'm wrestling with is still how to get this model rigged correctly. Once it has a decent CG armature inside of it, I think I can get an acceptable performance out of the critter. ...But I'm not there yet.
I want to show you one of the earliest clips I rendered -- so you can understand just how bad a "walk" can really be.
Here's another amusing error. The lower legs were wanting to flip outward... In the process of trying to correct that problem, I managed to twist the feet right into knots.
This is the best walk I made today. It's the same one that's in the color clip at the top.
For the sake of quick turn-around while rendering out test clips, I used "quickshade" instead of "realistic." I was only focusing on the legs today -- didn't touch the arms, didn't add the eyeballs. I didn't work on getting the weight (the up and down) of the torso right, or have it lean forward at all. And I didn't even bother to pick the feet up off the ground -- they just shuffle along.
That's stuff I can deal with... The things that I'm really fighting with are:
- feet slip beneath ground level
- feet slide across the ground when they're supposed to stay put
- the legs aren't bending smoothly, as you'd expect from tentacles
- the lower leg IK chains want to whip around in all directions
I'm not really sure how to proceed next. Maybe I'll spend some time on the shoggoths tomorrow...
posted by sven | May 12, 2007 10:50 PM | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
Comments
Amazing! And a good reminder why I'm pursuing puppet pushing. Great work, Sven.
Posted by: shelley Noble at May 12, 2007 11:05 PM
I'm not so sure, that even considering "fantasy physics", that a creature like this would stand up on its tentacles. Why not move the creature via slithering? The top-heavy nature of this thing standing on it's ballet toes kind of strips the horror-value, I'd say...
Posted by: Markalope at May 13, 2007 9:16 PM
markalope, have you seen the stop-mo tests? i think when the critters move on their tentacles it's pretty creepy, and that's just the mockup. check out one of the last film clips here:
http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/blog/archives/2007/03/elderthingpup.html
(and i could be wrong, but i think if they are just casually moving along, they may very well slither. but when they're panicking and running from the shoggoth, they rise up because it's faster for them to move that way and it makes them even bigger than they already are.)
Posted by: gl. at May 13, 2007 9:45 PM
Holy cow man!!!!
I didnt know you were doing this piece in cg?
I thought your tentical dood was all puppets... I hate rigging in 3d....least favorite part of computer animation.
I dont mind designiing the skeletons....I just HATE weighting the verticies.YUCK!
cool start man.....although I did like you puppet guy alot!
cant wait to see where you take this piece.
jriggityPosted by: justin rasch at May 14, 2007 12:02 AM