Squirrel Animation

Project Background

As part of advancing my career, I decided to update my demo reel to focus on my specialization: 3D character animation, including animals, humans, and all kind of creatures. Instead of showcasing a broad range of skills, I’m emphasizing the areas where I excel. To do so, I enrolled in a specialized course that covers advanced animation techniques, while the course primarily uses Blender—my preferred tool—the principles and techniques are versatile and can be applied across various platforms helping allowing me to broadening my areas of opportunities . After about a month of learning and mastering the initial techniques, this project is the first result of that journey.

Project Details

Please note that all assets used in this project are owned by P2design Academy. Since this is will be a character animation focused demo reel, my role was solely focused on the character animation.

For this project, I went with a simple story: a little squirrel wandering through a park, suddenly hearing a barking dog, and then following the squirrel fleeing away.

The animation includes four main movements: run cycle, a first idle, climb cycle and a second idle. These were created using the pose-to-pose technique. I started by blocking out the key poses, then added in-between or breakdown poses, and finally polished everything in spline mode.

The trickiest and most satisfying part of this project was capturing the squirrel’s quick movements and sudden stops, this can be appreciated the best paying close attention to the way its tail reacts to the body movements. I’m really happy with how it turned out and what I learned , how well-chosen animations can really bring a scene to life.

Deliverables

In order of appearance, the run cycle, the most versatile animation of the project.

The first idle used, in which the squirrel hears something and prepares to run away from the danger.

Like the run cycle, the climb cycle, very helpful to stablish the setting of the animation.

The last animation, a second idle helping to wrap the whole scene.

Lastly, the entire composition showcasing all the animations previously mentioned, all of them integrated in a narrative with sounds to help stand out even more the clip.