Leopard Animation by Alex Southcombe

Animation Apprentice student Alex Southcombe did this excellent piece of animation above, as part of studying for his Online MA in Animation at Buckinghamshire New University, our academic degree-awarding partner.  The animation was completed as part of Module DA703 "Animals and Creatures", in which our MA students tackle the art and craft of animal and creature locomotion.  Alex used the Leopard Rig by Truong, available for free download at Gumroad, which we recommend for animal and creature animation. 

Leopard Rig by Truong

Leopard rig by Truong

Alex used the Leopard Rig by Truong, available for free download at Gumroad. It is an attractive, well-structured rig with simple controls.

Leopard Rig Settings
FK/IK Spine switcher
When you first set up your shot, make sure you find the little blue cross on the side of the rig; it's the FK/IK Spine switcher. Under FKIKBlend, set this channel to 10. This will enable you to animate the up and down motion on the leopard's body more easily.

Real-time Playback
In order to get real-time playback in your viewport in Maya, you need to go into your Animation Preferences (bottom right hand corner of the screen) and then Under Settings/Animation/Evaluation change Evaluation Mode to Parallel. Also in settings, select Display, and make sure that Rendering Engine is set to DirectX 1.1 and Default Viewport is set to Viewport 2.0. If it's still lagging, stay in Preferences, look under Timeslider, and set Update View to "active", not "all". This will speed up the response time.

Eye controller fix from Truong

Facial expressions - but no eye direction controller
The leopard has some useful facial expressions, but watch out: it lacks an eye direction controller, which makes it hard to control the eye direction. When you move the leopard's head his eyes will move in the same direction, making it hard to create the illusion that (for example), the leopard is looking at a fixed point in space.

Fixing the eye direction controller
There is a fix for this, but it involves digging into the Outliner and changing some stuff.  Open the Outliner and look for AimEye_M. Once you find it, ctrl+A to open up the Attributes. In the AimEye_MShape tab, scroll down, select the Object Display tab, and turn visibility on. Then do the same thing with AimEte_R and AimEye_L.  You will see a locator in the Viewport for the eye controls. Select the locator, go to the Channel Box, change the Aim attribute to 10, and change the Follow attribute to 1. Now, when you animate the leopard's head, the eyes should remain focused on the eye controller locators.

Alternative cat rigs
Some alternative cat rigs which do allow real-time playback are the cheetah rig, and also the very low-poly Houdini cat rig.  To see some excellent animation done with Houdini, check out this cat leap by Animation Apprentice student Giuseppe Candido.





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