Creature Locomotion by Maria Robertson

Parasite rig by Truong

Escape Studios' 3rd year animation undergraduate Maria Robertson has recorded a new series of creature locomotion videos for our expanding Vimeo channel, showing how to animate a six legged creature. The tutorial uses the free Parasite crab rig by Truong.

In this series of three videos, hosted at Vimeo, Maria explains how to go about animating a six-legged walk cycle.

Maria shows how to build and block out the shot, from scratch. Animators are actors, and we need to create a memorable performance, but we also need a workflow that we can depend upon.

Parasite rig by Truong
The tutorial uses the excellent free Parasite Rig from Truong CG, and available for free download from his official site. However, you can use any multi-legged rig you like, and apply the same principles set out in the tutorial.

There are plenty of free crab and spider rigs out there, and the same principles can be applied to all of them. You might try the Raa spider rig as an alternative. 

Multi-legged locomotion
For an introduction to the principles of six-legged and eight-legged locomotion, watch this short video by animation legend Richard Williams.





Planet Mars
Truong's Parasite rig starred as the "Xye Crab", a highly endangered alien species that was the hero of one of our second year undergraduate group projects, a documentary short titled "Planet Mars".

The project was completed as part of the second year of animation studies at Escape Studios. To find out what happened to life on Mars, watch this 3 minute film.



Our students had just six weeks to create the film, from concept to final render. Animation was done in Maya 2018, rendering was done in Unreal Engine. The lead animator was Maria Robertson, who has now prepared this series of videos to show how it was done.

Vimeo Channel

Maria Robertson

There are 3 short videos to watch, each about 10 minutes long:

1. Brief Overview of the Hexapod
2. Creating the Pattern
3. Building on the Foundation

To find the videos at our Vimeo channel, follow this link. Like all our videos, this one is password-protected, meaning it is only available for our current students and Escapees.

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt, now recruiting for September 2019, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.