A Study of 6-Legged Creatures Animation

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THESIS

Problem & Why?

As we already know, there have been many proven formulas and guides on how to animate biped, quadruped and even flying creatures which are used by many animators around the world. Even though there are many movies and games that featured 6-legged creatures, there are not many extensive studies and formal documented guides for this type of creature basic’s movements especially with different leg designs, timings, directions and movement patterns.

Creature with multiple legs like this can become complicated to animate, so this is the area that I want to study, and perhaps come out with the standard basic formula that can be useful to others. My thesis will basically a study on the basic movements of 6-legged creatures while my FMP will be a short animation with these types of creature characters that demonstrates the findings from the thesis.

Scopes

• Focus on 6-legged creatures for their 5 basic movements to understand the timings and patterns which are walk & run cycle, jumping & landing and turning direction animation. To note, that some 6-legged creatures are moving sideways instead of forward.

• Study around the 3 types of creatures with different leg designs.
  • Insect Type Legs: segmented and usually spread around the creature body such as ant, crab, scorpion and spider. Spider has 8 legs by the way, but I will probably use it as well since it can be useful to understand more on how multi-legged creature moves.
  • Horse Type Legs: front legs are usually bending backward such as horse, cow and sheep.
  • Tiger Type Legs: front legs are usually bending forward such as cat, tiger and lion. 

The creatures that will be studied for the last 2 types are alien and fantasy creatures from movies and game since this type of 6-legged creature don’t exist in the real world.

References

I will do observation on the real creatures such as ant, cockroach and crab either from live or videos as well as existing animation, movies and games for the alien and fantasy creatures.

And I will also refer the previous studies on biped and quadruped as they will still has some relations to this topic.

Aim & Benefits

My aim for this thesis is I hope to discover and develop the basic keys, pattern and timing for 6-legged animation that can be applied to any real, alien and fantasy creature. And as I mentioned previously, perhaps this research can be useful and become a reference for other animators to animate this type of creature. My research probably can be continued for hybrid creature with wings, more multi-legged creature like centipede or creature with hands that doubled as legs.

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FINAL MAJOR PROJECT

I’m actually very interested in character animation especially towards a stylise animation. So without moving far from my interest and my thesis, I’m planning to do a stylised character animation that combined with the knowledge from my thesis of the 6-legged creature. 

Concept

A short animation story or clips with stylised 6-legged creatures as characters with real video footages as background since I’ve studied and explored more on this technique in my personal project in term 3.

Software

3d software: Blender
Camera Tracking: 3D Equalizer and Blender
Editing & Compositing: DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro

Objective & Goal

I hope I can further strengthen the skills that I want to focus for my career which are character animation, rigging and matchmove while at the same time demonstrates the formulas that have been studied in my thesis.