Work In Progress

While looking through a D&D Monster book, I came across this creature, the Odopi:

All I could think about was, "Hey, that would be fun to animate! But those sure are a lot of arms, by golly!" Hmm... I wondered, what would it be like to animate this fun creature without any hand keyframing? Sounded like a fun project, so let's get at it!

For this project, I wanted to achieve the final result without any hand keyframe animation, so that meant a whole lot of MEL, Expressions, Dynamics and procedual animation.

There are expressions driving the clawing and clenching action of the hands and the blinking of the eyes.

Here is a comparison of the low-poly arm construct versus the normal mapped arms:

There is a dynamic rig surrounding the arms, connected by a series of springs. At the end of each arm is a distance node which controls the bending of the arm when it hits the ground. Here's a messy picture of the setup:

Here is a test of the Odopi coming down a hill:

More updates to come...