For this assignment I wanted to try to create, rig, and animate my own character. I’m always inspired by animals and thought I would try to rig and animate a quadruped. I’ve seen videos showing how arctic foxes hunt in the snow and thought that it would be a great first project to try to replicate with my own character.
Inspired by low-polygonal creatures and my old adventures hunting for topaz in the mountains with my grandfather back home in Utah, I set out to make something light-hearted and fun.
Topaz from my home state of Utah
This project was very difficult and also extremely ambitious, since I have zero experience animating anything, let alone an animal, but I enjoyed the process. Due to time constraints I had to render the video at a lower quality than I would have liked (still took 4 days to render). It’s also much shorter than I would have liked, but I’m still pleased with what I was able to accomplish in 3 weeks.
Work in progress - rig is working!
I tried for about a week to get the particle simulations working as snow, and I’m glad I added them. They add more movement to the animation as a whole, but looking back I think I would have added a lot more snow.
The audio is sampled and mixed from the Houseki No Kuni OST (Land of the Lustrous), and the music is by Yoshiaki Fujisawa. I was listening to the soundtrack while I was animating and a lot of my inspiration for the composition came from it. The show itself is also excellent and I highly recommend it!
the upside down! (the underside of my animation)
Here's the final result!