Rigging and Animation
In order to bring some life into the render, both the turtle and water had to have some sort of movement, to communicate time passing and liveliness. One of the benefits of an independent piece is that typical pipeline procedures can be creatively ignored, edited, and adjusted without worrying about the flexibility of the setup or passing the file to a colleague.
The Turtle: rigging
The turtle character in this shot does not have a rig with the animator friendly controls and kinematics, and therefore can’t really be called a rig, but rather is more of a skinned skeleton.
By placing joints at the most fundamental pivot points of his body, the turtle is able to walk, look around, and even jump off and climb up his little mountain.
The Water: Blendshapes
While fluid simulations are beautiful, feel natural, and demonstrate an understanding of CG physics, I felt as though putting a lifelike simulation in a stylized piece may hinder the look I was hoping to communicate. Additionally, the movement of the water is sourced by the filter in the tank that isn’t seen in the shot, so manually creating that ripple rather than simulating it’s source off screen, was much more efficient in terms of time and resources. By modeling the water manually around the edge of the mountain, I created 3 different shapes that blending between each other on a frame rate of 3’s.