Larva Snake

I wanted to add some « organic-looking-kind-of » animation and I was amazed by this beautiful animation made by Miki Nemcek : https://vimeo.com/223947902. The look of the « larva thing » is just mind blowing and I loved the way the skin change color a thickness when it swells. It reminded me a tutorial I’ve seen from Greyscalegorilla some years ago. You can take a look at the result of this tutorial here : https://vimeo.com/167906928 (the link to the tutorial is in the description).

I tried to get as close as I could with the time I had, and even if I’m not 100% satisfied with the result I think that something interesting can be done, if pushed further. The animation is mostly done by textures that drive deformers. To have a perpetual animation without the use of keyframe, I made a simple Xpresso setup that basically tells the texture to move a bit every frame. That way, as long as the time goes on, the animation will be played. The job that took me the most time is the texturing/shading one. I really loved the pattern that Miki Nemcek created for the video shown above, but I didn’t want to have the same « larva » type… I wanted something closer to a snake even if we can’t really tell if it’s an animal or something else.

The 3 little pieces I’ve made are very short because they were meant to be used in the showreel with a very short cut, but just for the purpose of showing this « clips », I’ve put them together and mirrored them several times to have a longer video to watch.

Final result || Music : Rick Steel – Power :

Deformers animation || What is red and yellow is the Vertex Map that drives the change of color and « thickness » of the skin :

Redshift Shader Graph for the skin  :

The little Xpresso setup that drives the animation  :