Night Of The Mutant Hedgehog

Night Of The Mutant Hedgehog

This is my short 3D horror animation I did during my studies at Uni last year.  For a major project in one of my classes, I had created the hedgehog creature, rigged the creature, and animated a short first person style animation of the creature as it wandered, stalked and ran after the viewer. 

How Did I Create This?

Planning 

Ive done a lot of 3D creatures in the past and always wanted to animated one of them, so I decided that this was the time to create a short animated video of one of my horror creatures. The hedgehog creature originally was one of my childhood drawings of a cute hedgehog, and when I saw it, the idea to turn this into a 3D creature with a little horror twist hit me. My idea and planning for this animation was to create the viewer walking through an alley, then discover the creature, who later then lunged after the viewer once seeing them. 

Creating the Hedgehog Creature

I first blocked out the general shape in Maya. I then exported the block out to Zbrush and started to work on the details, adding the teeth and the spike to the creature in Zbrush instead of Maya. Once the details were done in Zbrush, I began to paint and colour the creature. I then exported the final details and the polypaint out to Maya and set up the creature with the scene ready for animation.

The Animation

I first rigged the character in Maya, making sure everything was working nicely, I found an alley way on TurboSquid from an unknown artist, and exported both the environment and creature to Maya. After that I blocked out the creatures movements and key framed where I wanted the creature to be. At the same time I animated the camera. After that I went into detail and finalise the animation of both the creature and the camera. Then I animated the environment slightly, for example, the light flickering, the trash can lid knocked over etc. 

Finalising 

While this was being rendered, I found free audio files and a green screen static video which I needed upon pixabay.com, and once it was render, I took all files needed and added both the static video and audio files into Adobe After Effects.