Spaceman!

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Welcome to the forums!
Glad you’re liking the progress, I used to stay away from animating complex tentacle actions, Not anymore :slight_smile: Give the tool a try and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out on the forum :slight_smile:

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I started writing all of this as a post but got dense fast… So I made a nice little video for a simple tentacle setup. Once I get a rig setup for the alien I can do a more in depth look but this has some nice basics to play with…

ALSO

Here is the maya scene the play with :
squid.zip (68.0 KB)

The whole setup and animation was under 20 minutes from maya opening to the animation you see here.

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Also having a bit of play with this spaceman. :blush:

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Has anyone tried simulating their cameras?

I’ve kept the camera local to the spaceman as a Soft Translation marker parented to the spaceman

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Awesome !!! Thanks for sharing ! will play around this !

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Cool stuff. Just saw the new vid posted on LinkedIn. Was wondering how do we get convincing struggle from the spaceman? I find it hard to direct the becoming working on similar stuff. It’s hard to find a balance between animation and ragdoll.

For your example, how do we make the leg doing really intense kicking trying to break away from the tentacles?

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Hi LaFed! Welcome to the forums!

Great questions, I’ve been playing with a tone of different workflows seeing which one works which doesn’t. I think I’ve landed on a good middle ground where I still have alot of control over the animation and posing, but let the simulation do all the hard work, I’m going to be upload some of those workflow videos very soon over here.

The big break through I had was to have the pose stiffness rather low to get a looseness to the sim and use some markers at the end of the the limbs to be helpers or supports .

I got into it a bit over here, but by doing this I know the leg will be where I want it to be in relation to the tentacle …

Here’s the vid LaFed was referencing

J

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This technique only works if you have Translate Motion - Soft
image

This allows the Marker to translate.

Here’s a quick example showing how I can art direct the interaction of the alien moving back and forth toward the Spaceman… notice how the first part of the clip kinda looks right… this is due to the tentacles stretching causing the body to look like its moving back and forth… but we’re missing some of the moments I animated… by Reparenting the body of the alien to the chest of the Spaceman we now get all that animation preserved and it simulates as if it’s one structure- which makes sense as the alien is holding onto the spaceman .

I use this technique for putting props into hands that can be dropped or picked up …

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most synman thing ever

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Hi Jason, this is wonderful. Do you have a tutorial on how you setup the animations? Like controller where the end tentacles should go and attaching/detaching to the body? Thanks