Creature Animation Workshop: VIEW 19 Oct

I'll be hosting a creature animation workshop at this year's VIEW Conference again this year.  The two-hour animation workshop takes place online on Monday, 19 October from 11am to 1pm Italian time.

I'll be teaching students how to tackle some creature animation using Autodesk Maya.  We'll be animating spiders - demonstrating how to break down an apparently complex motion - an eight-legged walk - into simple parts to get a sophisticated result.

So if you fancy animating some creepy crawlies, join me on Monday, 19th October from 11am to 1pm Italian Time.  To sign up, follow this link.

About VIEW

VIEW is the annual VFX Conference that takes place in the Italian city of Turin. VIEW attracts many big names in the animation industry; last year's talent roster included Brad Bird, Hans Zimmer and Conrad Vernon, revealing the secrets behind their work. It's a great event, which this year will be taking place partly online. 

Character Rig - Raa

In my two-hour online animation workshop we'll be using a free character rig which you can download from HighEnd3D.com - the Raa Spider Rig.  Raa is free, and can be downloaded here.  Raa is an easy-to-learn, low poly rig, perfect for learning creature locomotion.

Creature Animation Workshop

In this two hour class I'll be showing how to animate a spider in motion. The class is just two hours long, and is aimed at animation beginners. You don't need to know anything about animation to follow the class - though a basic understanding of the Maya interface will certainly help. 

Spider by Steve Woodhouse

How to animate spiders

Spiders look complex - eight legs moving together at furious speed - and hard to animate. But I'll be teaching a simple technique which allows the animator to keyframe just two animation curves - and then copy these throughout the rig. It's a system which breaks down an apparently complex action into simple components, making the difficult seem easy. 

Animation with Raa
To see some of the great work that can be done with Raa, check out the videos below by Escape Studios tutor Lee Caller.

How to sign up

You can sign up at the official site here.

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 2021, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.