Spaceman!

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The larger one is the best. :blush: How are they moving about so much? It’s as if they’re under water. Maybe the tentacle monsters could have a “grappling hook”, something to shoot out and latch onto the spaceman and reel him in. I think a space environment is extra sensitive to any pins or worldspace forces. The spaceman could have thrusters to move around perhaps.

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This is looking really nice !!!

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I tried something crazy and it worked, I’m going to break this down further in a video.
This is going to need a full Jason talking over a video type of breakdown.

Using Translate Motion: soft you can animate a distance constraints position locally to a marker the video below I have a cube parented to a cube. The small cube is soft

`Translate Motion :Soft’ is amazing, you can animate not only the rotation, but translation of an object and the simulation updates accordingly.

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I keep the Translate Stiffness rather high as to not get the tentacle pulling the cube off the big cube.

The big cube is in world space to keep it in a some what locked position.
The Distance Constraint is set to :
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Distance Method : Maximum
With min and max to zero , this keep the distance between the tentacle and the cube zero

SO! for the first clip I took advantage of these cubes moving around the spaceman’s arms and head so I know the little guy will always be hitting his beats on those locations… and for the Big Guy I have cubes that control the end of the tentacles , these are parented under the body so they will move where the creature goes… this is getting a bit too complicated to do over txt, it’s recording time!

More to come!

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We are going to be able to do some stellar lighting on this shot. :star_struck:

For the Big Cube vs Little Cube, I think it could be made more clear if you also animated the Big Cube, or got rid of the Pin for it such that it could fall to the ground. The key difference between this and a normal Pin constraint is that the tentacle would reach the same relative position on the box, no matter where the box were in the simulation. Whereas a Pin would try and reach your animated position, which would remain unaffected by the simulation.

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Hey this is pretty nice !!! Pure GOLD !!!

nice tricks…!!! I Will definitely try out more stuff with Distance …
I did play around a bit with Woody test but this is even more creative !

Thanks for sharing

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This video is easier to see what’s going on…


The ‘Red’ cubes are soft transforms parented under the root of the character so they will always move locally where my creature is.

I’ve made distance constraints from those red cubes to the tips of the tentacles so they get pulled along where the red cubes are doing… and where is that… to the mouth :slight_smile:

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Some rough storyboard ideas…

We start with a floating wrench, hand grabs it. right into a smash into the face of one alien , teeth go flying, wind up for another hit! but gets grabbed with teeth chomping down on his smashing hand.
He uses toothless to smash the one holding his arm. which stuns it, giving the space man enough time to grab a tentacle , pull and rip it off… we pull to a wide and see a HUGE alien opening its mouth and in a flash Spaceman is lunch! then we have a shot of the alien just eating with his mouth open… maybe we get bits of spaceman flying out the mouth?

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Thoughts?
Ideas?
How can we make this even more complex ? I’m also going to have extra aliens holding onto the spaceman the whole time…

I would NOT want to animate this sequence without ragdoll …

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Great! I sense a few slow-motion shots. :slight_smile:

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Moving onto an animatic now to get a sense of flow and timing. It’s going to be loose but with Ragdoll we’re going to get some nice looking details right from the start… Here’s a quick test for the last shot where the spaceman gets eaten !

Fun Tip - you can break libs off by having your Translate Motion set to soft with a high Stiffness and low Damping
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Animate both the Pose Stiffness and Translate Stiffnessto0so there wont be anything controlling themarker`

Here I’m using two Pins to pull the alien apart … I animate the values on the area in which I want the break to happen make sure you set the Translate Motion to soft

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… nice tips !!..
I can only imagine how long would it take me to animate that motion without RG…
…
nice stuff , thanks for sharing !

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Eeeeeek :sweat_smile:

For future readers, this worked because of the solver is freaking out. This should will likely (hopefully) have been addressed by the time you read this. There will be a Breakable = On attribute, with a Break Force = 10 attribute to determine at what point to break apart.

Love the big beast. Picturing the lighting for this waters my mouth. :blush: Also it reminds me of an episode of Rick and Morty :sweat_smile: (S02 E11)

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Blocking out some of the ideas, Might speed the actions up to get it all in for around 20 seconds…

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Goshhhh!!! How many versions can you do in a day???

This is looking really cool!!! the floaty feeling works pretty good

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I’m blown away by this work, and these results. I need to animate tentacles coming out of a fridge and scooping something up. I feel I should learn this kit, in order to do it. Looks like it will fit the purpose so well.

Looking forward to see how you get on…

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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?