Cheetah

A collaborative project where I handled the rigging and animation.

The character is composed of three different mesh layers, and therefore needed three skinning passes:

On the left is the transparent layer that acts as a Bifrost particle emitter. In the final render, small particles fly off of the Cheetah as they run. These are meant to appear to come off of the cheetah at all parts of the body, so the full mesh is used to generate them. The middle mesh is a semi-transparent object that fills in the gaps of the more broken about circular shells on the surface of the cheetah. This was skinned identically to the one on the left in a standard three influence skinCluster. The third layer, on the right, is a rigid skin so that individual circles do not lose their shape as they deform. This was a back and forth effort to make sure the semi-transparent mesh was weighted correctly to not poke through the rings of the rigid one.

The control rig is built out using my custom autorigging pipeline. All limbs have FK and IK support. Cheetahs are one of the most flexible animals, especially in their spine, so that area has a lot of flexibility. It has full IK stretch, and can be changed to root the spine at either the neck or the pelvis.

The animation is done in 60 frames per second since one full cycle of a cheetah sprint is less than half a second. The render was originally to be done in Unreal Engine, though in the end the final execution is in Arnold. As such, the rig is fully joint deforming, so the animation is game ready as well.

Final render!