Tuesday 11 July 2023

Animate a Scorpion in Motion

In this Scorpion Animation Tutorial we demonstrate how to animate a scorpion in motion.  Scorpions are fun to animate, and there is a good free rig available online by Kiel Figgins, which can be found here at his official website. 

Watch the video below for a general introduction to the rig, how to find it, and how the rig works. The scorpion tutorial is similar to the spider tutorial, but a little more complex, as we have to deal with eight legs, two big pincers and also a tail.

Scorpion Animation Tutorial


Scorpion Locomotion
Scorpion Rig by Kiel Figgins
Scorpions are predatory arachnids of the order "Scorpiones". They have eight legs (though our rig has just six), and are fun to animate.   

To get started, find the Scorpion Rig by Kiel Figgins here at his official site.  If you have any trouble downloading the rig, or if you would like our updated version (which fixes one or two bugs in the rig) send us an email at info@animationapprentice.org and we will send you a copy. 

How to Animate the Scorpion Rig
To see how to use the Scorpion Rig, watch the Video below:



Arachnid Motion
Lee Caller's "Tank -v- Scorpion"
Like a spider's walk, the motion of a scorpion looks complex, but is in fact quite easy to animate, by breaking the motion down into simple steps.  Start by animating a simple 16 frame walk cycle on the first set of the scorpion's legs. 

Once this is working, copy and paste the animation curves onto the second set of legs. Then offset the curves by 8 frames.  

Then, copy and paste the same curves onto the third set of legs, offsetting the curves so that each leg offsets the one before (our scorpion rig in fact only has six legs, so we will stop at six).

Scorpion Tutorial
Lee Caller's "Tank -v- Scorpion"

To watch the Scorpion tutorial, follow the links below

Scorpion Tutorial Part 1

Scorpion Tutorial Part 2

Scorpion Tutorial Part 3

Scorpion Tutorial Part 4

Scorpion Tutorial Part 5

Scorpion Tutorial Part 6

Scorpion Tutorial Part 7

The password is the same as for all our videos. 

Lee Caller - Tank -v- Scorpion
To see the kind of work that can be done with this rig, and by following the tutorial, take a look at Lee Caller's "Tank -v- Scorpion" animation below.

 

Also check out Will Smith's Scorpion Animation below:



  
Animal and Creature Animation at Animation Apprentice
Gorilla animation by Michael Davies
We have many resources here at Animation Apprentice for students looking to learn how to animate animals and creatures. 

To get started, see the blog posts below:


Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)