innovative?

The next project I have for this year is innovations. It's a bit of a daunting project at first, it suggests we have to be innovative in the world of CG, and although it is partially marked based on your innovativeness, we don't have to be innovative in the world of CG, we just have to justify how what we're doing is innovative to us personally.

So for this project I have chosen to do fantasy creature animation. I found it hard to come up with anything really innovative in the field of animation, so I've decided to push myself and try something new for me. I've done a bit of quadruped animation before, but I stuck strictly to reference, it looks good and still needs some tweaking, but it is purely a motion reference project. You can check it out here.

As the name suggests i am going to animate a completely fictional creature. This is where the challenge lies. I cannot just go out and find it's real world equivalent, study it, and more or less copy its movements. I have to think outside the box, study the fantasy creature's anatomy and compare it to similar real world creatures, then piece together how the beast will move and act etc. I am looking forward to this project as I have some scope to really explore the area. My project will focus on combining elements of real world creatures, so for example the fantasy beast might move like a spider but have the mentality and aggressive streak of  of a lion, this is what I am going to look into.

Here is the rig I will be using (I did not model or rig this):

This is the project I have barely started on, however I have some basic initial research. I started where most people do and googled creature animation and a few other similar searches. This was very unsuccessful and annoying, as all the results were for creature animation schools and I couldn't find anything on the process or techniques involved in creature animation. So I decided to take a chance and I emailed MPC asking if one of their animators could help me by answering a few questions. Thankfully (and a little surprisingly) they replied and i managed to get my questions answered. I'm glad I took the chance as the answers to the questions will help inform my research and allow me to plan my project similar to the professionals.

That's my innovations project so far, I'm sure I'll put some more up about this over christmas. That only leaves one more project for me to introduce.

Stu