Animating Creatures Comfortably

Creature rigs (for free) can often feel rather scarce, when looking for a job it can be especially necessary to save costs wherever you can. However when the goal is to show your awesome creature animating abilities it  cant hurt to showcase the widest variety possible.  If you havent heard of Truong CG yet then your library of great creature rigs is about to get a lot bigger.  (A few of the rigs on offer from Truongs Gumroad Page) Free Rig Versions Here! Truong offers  an extensive library of rigs they have created themselves amazingly for free. So long as its for non commercial purposes naturally. Whether its dinosaurs, songbirds or demons Truong CG really offers an incredible variety of rigs  that allow animators to just put that wonderful creature knowledge  to use. If you like what Truong is offering and would like to support his efforts you can always add any amount of money to your free rig order. Or if his rigs help your...

Eadward Muybridge "The Father of Motion Picture" 1830-1904 was the first person to record animals and  peoples movements in series of photographs. Initially Muybridge set out to end the age old debate of  where a horses  legs are placed during a trot and later gallops also.   (Muybridge Image of a horse galloping) These inital finding were published in the book The Horse In Motion (Full name of the text way to long to type in entirety) and proved so revealing (In many ways the foundation for gait analysis) that Muybridge went on to take some  100,000 photos of animals  and people engaging in acts of locomotion.  (Excerpt From The Horse In Motion) Before Muybridges photographic evidence of how animals truly move at speed many artistic depictions showed all four  limbs outstretched at once. This look  rather ridiculous now but in the book examples are given of the ''mythical gallop'' extracted from the  Elementary...

To start things off here is an invaluable resource for any animator looking to get there head round quadruped locomotion. The document linked down below allows an animator just making there first steps into animating four legged creatures to begin to understand the subtleties of four legged movement. The Writer, Dr. Sumida frequently consults with many animation studios from Disney to DreamWorks so his understanding of both animation and the science of animal movement proves invaluable in bridging the gap between the two areas of study. Here are a few excerpts from the pdf, while I strongly suggest you give the whole thing a read these two pages should already offer some insight into the wonderful world of quadruped locomotion. I chose to include a page comparing a trot to a gallop to help illustrate just how varied four legged movement can be. Too often it seems inexperienced animators assume the front and back legs move in a similar fashion to our own. This can result in v...