A whale passed by, the making of #3

The tale of a whale with a tail. Every whale needs something to propel it through the ocean. A 3d animated whale needs a rig and some animation, or it will forever be stranded.

For this small animation, a fairly simple rig was sufficient (if you dont know what a rig is, its the skeleton that drives the animation of a mesh).

Since a whale doesnt have any legs I just made a simple spine all the way down. Notice that there is very few bones in this spine,Thats because I will use "bendy" bones


The bendy bones means that the rotation of a bone is distributed over a variable number of subsegments. this is really useful for tails and spines etc. it gives a much smoother deformation with very few bones and thus, it makes it easier to animate.
Snakes,fish,and whales have a very similar movement pattern. if you want to be a good animator(and I am not saying that I am) you need to look at how things move. Luckily youtube and the internet at large is your friend here. it is much easier to find good reference material today than it was when I was a young man. So, I watched a lot of clips of whales swimming, and made my animation accordingly. Most of the movement comes from the two bones in the tail, but to make something look alive it is important that everypart moves a little, with humans it is often the breathing that people tend to forget, with the whale I needed to make sure that the flippers and the head also moved. These are just subtle movement but always try to think about why something moves. In this case I tried to make the flippers and the heafd follow the changes in direction of the whale, to make it look like it use them for steering.
At this point, the whale would not be moving anywhere. It would just be flapping while hanging stationary in the "water".

I needed some kind of trajectory for it to follow, and this is actually quite easy. whenever something has to move along something, you can make a spline and just let whatever you are moving , stick to this line. It makes it a lot easier to control the movement and the speed at which it moves, and also helps with planning the camera since the spline will be visible in the camera view but wont get rendered. I did a fairly simple spline but these can be as comlex as you like.
The whale is now ready to swim into the big blue ocean.

Next step is, to make an ocean for it to swim in, but that will be the subject of another post.

If you want to see how I made this little clip there is more information to be found here:

Original post
part 1 making of
part 2 making of

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Im EvilHippie, a compulsive creative and jack o' trades. if you want to know more about me check out my introduction post here

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