yU+co Website
Dancing Ant Animation
A Breakdancing Ant for the yU+co Website
In the fall of 2023, I was brought in to work on a special animation for the yU+co website. I was briefed that it would be an animation of the old company mascot: an ant.
I was then informed that they wanted this anatomically-correct ant to breakdance like a person. An additional constraint was that I could not break the joint constraints of a typical ant.
I got reference video and a rig for the ant in Maya and started to put things together. I asked for clarification on the overall goals and character details of the ant, and got to work on a walk cycle and initial blocking of one of the breakdance sets. I got creative to find ways for the ant to express similar poses to the reference material without breaking it’s ant-ness.
After the initial reference match blocking, I was given an additional task for some corrective rigging. There was a new model which required altering the rig to get the antenna placement right.
Certain parts of this process were challenging. I didn’t have access to the rigging tool that was used for the original rig. In this case, I had to improvise a solution to make sure the rig joints properly matched the new model and worked with the rig controls. I also only had access to an older version of Maya, which prevented me from using a lot of the plugins that I’ve gotten used to using to make the animation process easier. I had to get manual with a lot of techniques that could have been handled a plugin.
Despite the challenges, I managed to make the rig corrections in a timely manner. I was tasked to create another breakdance set and create some walk-cycle variations. For the walk-cycle variations, I utilized an animation layers workflow to quickly experiment with pose and mood alterations to the original cycle.
After the additional breakdancing sets, I was told to take the walk cycle and breakdance sequences and combine them into a single seamless clip. It was a challenging task, but through some hard work and liberal use of manual locator control baking, everything came together. After establishing continuity, I performed a relatively quick blocking plus pass to achieve some secondary motion with other parts of the ant. The ant’s antennae and thorax were the main focus of the pass.
With an animated playblast and an export for visualization completed, I received positive comments on the work I had done and was released from the project.
Total turnaround of the whole process was about 7 business days.
You can see a visualization pass of the animation below
Check out how it looks on the website here
Closing thoughts:
I’m proud of the work that I was able to produce in the time that I was given. There certainly were challenges in over the course of this project, but nothing that I couldn’t surmount with my expertise.
I do wish that I had more time to work through the animation and give it some additional layers of polish, especially to solve some of the clipping issues that come up in the animation. Had I been given more time to polish the animation and had the opportunity to animate to a set camera, I believe I could have delivered better quality work.