Internship Work #8

 

[time taken: 2 weeks; 1-2 days per shot]

These shots are part of a much bigger scene, involving a caveman chasing after an animal. Here, we were given different storyboards for each shot, which we have to base each our shots off of. These shots were based off of these storyboards:

Description: As the caveman climbs up the tree to pluck out the fruits, he soon notices a rabbit hopping around the scenery. The caveman then decides to give chase, and the rabbit scurries off to a nearby pond, where it hides within the water. After peeking out from the water to assess its surroundings, it soon gets knocked out by a rock thrown by the caveman. The caveman then proudly walks off with its prize, but soon notices something rustling in the bushes...

For the animal, I was unable to find any decent free rabbit rig that was also a quadruped rig (there were a few rabbit rigs that were bipedal, like the Judy Hopps rig). So in its place, I decided to use the Boxy Sabertooth Tiger rig from Truong CG (https://gumroad.com/l/boxysaber).

The shots presented in the storyboards here didn't show certain things very clearly; it doesn't accentuate certain things enough. So while I did follow the storyboards closely, I added some additional shots and camera angles for both added context, and to give a few of the shots some added strength.

Specifically, I added a few shots from the animal's POV, for the scene where he gets knocked out by the rock. This added some more of that 'oomph' that the shot needed, while also being efficient for the time allotted to me.

I previously hadn't done much quadruped animations prior to these shots, so I had to take some references from the internet of different animals of similar stature, like dogs and cats. I specifically looked at videos of these animals jumping for the shots where it's jumping around. I then jotted down keyframes for the jump, and applied it to my animation here.

In the shots where the caveman is holding the animal, I wasn't able to get the pose exactly how it looked in the boards, because of the tiger's size. So, I made it so that he was holding it with two hands instead of one. Setting up the pose involved implementing a few simple parent constraints, with the center-of-gravity of the animal being parented with the COG and the IK hands of the caveman. This way, I was able to manipulate the COG control of the animal, and the parented caveman controls would follow, moving it around in a realistic way.

After presenting this work to others, I was informed about a few things. Namely, I didn't receive much appreciation for my deviations from the storyboards. While I was told that they did work well, I was also told that, for many actual productions, we often aren't given much leeway and freedom in the process of creating our shots. So, I had to do some small corrections, and then it was time for us to move on to the next few storyboards.