Squid Build 3.

I was going to rig each individual limb with a skeleton and key-frame the movements myself, which would be good because so far I haven’t done any animation in Maya or tried out it’s wonderful curve editor (whatever one of those is – just add more key-frames right?).   Baris’s idea was to convert to squid into nCloth. This is some sort of dynamic object that relies on physics and stuff, but with the right numbers and setting you could quite easily make it act like a lump of flesh!

Time to play around a bit.

The hardest part was making the body stay reasonably still and not be swept off by the water (just a flat plane). Once I had realised I had done something stupid – combined 2 nCloth objects together before trying to weld transform specific vertex to nothingness etc whatever… Done it properly now and it is looking pretty cool! And much more like the original drawing rather than the model with it’s silly sticking out limbs.

Time to draw a few dozen sheets of papers worth of scribbles to be animated as textures/materials.       Aaaaaannd figure out how to key-frame the water and render a dynamic sequence. Quite straight forward now, but even more time consuming with loads of drawing and waiting on renders.