Character & Creature Animation Reel

Character & Creature Animation Reel

Hi everybody!  

Here's my latest animation reel about creatures and characters which I brought to life!

This demo reel was created nearly from scratch, some have more work on modelling and rigging than others.

Hope you enjoy it!

Dragon 

The dragon project was created in collaboration with my college Marc Mesa, FX TD & Artist.

We started with the idea to recreate this shot from Fantastic Beasts 2 and make it with our style. Marc was in charge of the environment and pyro and I was in charge to adapt a skeletal mesh to an existing dragon rig, animate it and exporting it with an alembic file from Maya to Houdini.

Horse

This horse project was created from scratch and with just one reference on the fall but it was nearly visible because of the quality and all the smoke on the shot. Sometimes looking for a good reference is very hard to meet your animation requirements and you have to improvise and think on how biomechanics of the creature can work.

I used an existing rig of a horse and animated it in Maya, re-texturing it with substance painter and exported all to Unreal Engine 4 for rendering. 

In UE4, I used a free environment called Rural Australia and free assets from Bridge to adapt it to match my animation. UE4 helped me to create a fast render and processed image that I loved.

Also I took time to learn about particles with UE4 to simulate the smoke.

Lioness climb

With this project, I took a Lioness instead of other feline climbers because I found interesting that this species don't look to climb so much considering that they are on the top of the food chain and they don't need to hide from other predators, they mostly climb to steal food.

I took an existing mesh of a Lioness and created the rig with the script Advanced Skeleton to animate it later in Maya. I also took and existing rig of a bird to be the food for the lioness. After that, I exported it to Blender to create and environment and rendering with Cycles X, to speed the render times.

I used Nuke X to do the post production and look for an interesting composition.

Raptor

In this project, I took a shot from Jurassic World: the fallen kingdom as a reference for my animation and created another environment with Blender and assets from Bridge and rendered it with Cycles X. 

I used an existing rig of a raptor, retextured in Substance Painter, animated in Maya and exported it to Blender.

Finally, after the rendering, composited it with Nuke X.

Bird

In this project, I took a real reference from birds to understand their behaviour and create an animation based on it. In this case, I also used an existing bird rig and animated it on Maya, and then, exported to Blender too.

This time, I tried to look for a more interesting compo for the project and took real reference. The god rays were created with an environmental fog and the shadows of the leafs.

Nuke X was used for compositing too.

Hulk 4 armed

In this project, I used a reference from Wrath of Titans and Alita: Battle Angel as a reference for this one.

This time I used one of the Long Winter rigs and created a mesh of a four arms zombie Hulk, using Zbrush, Maya and Substance Painter.

This time I used UE4 too to speed up the rendering and post processing times to create the sequence. I used the free environment City Park Environment Collection and adapted it to a night time.

Feline attack

For this project I tried another way of animation. Instead of using real references I went straight ahead with my imagination and knowledge which is a double-edged sword. As there are not much references on what I was looking for, I had to improvise on how an attack from a feline to a person would be. Thanks to the knowledge of biomechanical behaviour I could understand how the movement could happen.

I used the same rig from the last Lioness project and had time to improve it by adding more controls on the muscles. And the other one is Dude from Anim Props.

As most of the projects, I used Maya for animating, Blender for rendering and Nuke X for compositing.

Genji body mechanics

In this project, I adapted another Long Winter's rig and took the reference of Genji from Overwatch.

I used some real references to create the stunning movements and improvised others that couldn't find a proper reference.

I also used Maya for animating and Blender EEVEE for rendering.

Eyes

The gaze, one of the most commuticating way of all the creatures. 

This project was an interesting way to learn from Dreamworks how to change the expression with just the movement of the eyes mask.

This sequence was animated with one of the Long Winter's rig and re-textured with Substance Painter to look like a character from Avatar. As you might know, it was rendered with Blender and composed with Nuke X. :)

Wolverine

This project was one of the most challenging projects for the moment.

I created a more animated shot from Hugh Jackman's acting from X-Men's film.

I made a modelling and rig of a stylized Wolverine, based on the Mark Hawk's model, with the help of the Advanced Skeleton plugin for Maya. Created the hair and fur with xGen and build an environment with the help of Bridge using Blender Cycles X for rendering.

The main objective of the project was to create a believable animation of a character making an internal change. Also learning about xGen, testing render with Cycles X and compositing to accomplish a final result that could I could be proud of.

Special thanks to my mentors Francisco Calvache and Ismael Vega for all the feedback and advice.

All feedback is welcome. Thank you for your time!