Week Four: Yet More Visual Development! (And Also Some Rigging!)

At the beginning of this past week, the team had settled on three creature designs. One of them seemed like a no-go (the animators didn't seem super thrilled about dealing with more than four legs), so I whipped up a super low-poly model and rigged it for the animators to play around with and see if that was what they really wanted in a creature.

To test out different styles of creature, I added in a visibility switch for the hind legs. This way, the animators could choose whether or not they wanted two legs or four legs. (Polished up the IK/FK autorig to help with this!)

The rig with and without legs

General consensus was: "Yeesh, tails are a pain in the ass."

That they are.

So, I went back to the model and did some draw-overs. A couple people wanted claws, some wanted a different head shape, most wanted to make it less lizard-y. Everyone seemed more resigned about the tail than enthusiastic about it, kind of like a "Welp, we'll have to deal with it some way or other, won't we..."

Above are the drawovers, then the isolated drawings. Everyone had a different part of the creatures they liked, so I tried to shuffle things around and incorporate them accordingly.

This is one of the combinations I made. For some reason, a lot of people liked the dual-tail idea, but that's a whole lot of extra animation that we may not have time for. 

I don't know what hit me, but I think we kept getting stuck on the tails. One flash of inspiration later, and:

Boom! 

This is by no means finalized or even accepted, but I took this as an opportunity to use one of the textures a teammate had made and used it as the basis of the painted textures here. 

Even if it doesn't get okayed, I might just model and rig it anyways. It's a really fun looking design.