Poorly researched dinosaurs gif

[Víctor Paredes]

Hi. I really loved this illustration made by Jarom Vogel


So I dedicated last weekend to rig and animate it


I thought it was a nice challenge to reproduce all this using vectors. Also, that gives a lot of freedom to adjust the animation details.
Here's a little behind the scenes


I hope you like it

[Greenlaw]

Excellent!

But I disagree re: 'poorly researched'. Dinosaurs were actually very good dancers as this documentary footage clearly shows.

[drumlug13]

Ha! That's awesome

[alanthebox]

is it just me or is it incredibly fun to watch victor use moho? it always looks so effortless.

[synthsin75]

Love the six-legged shuffle.

[hayasidist]

Brilliant.

techniques that I love from this:

the 2 second pre-roll
the use of strokes and brushes over fill to give the dappled effects (all using Moho vector!)
the combination of point / bone (bone chain) animation (and not a smartbone in sight??!)

(if I've messed up / missed something, please correct me!)

well done Victor!

[Víctor Paredes]

Thanks for the nice comments!

techniques that I love from this:

the 2 second pre-roll
the use of strokes and brushes over fill to give the dappled effects (all using Moho vector!)
the combination of point / bone (bone chain) animation (and not a smartbone in sight??!)

(if I've messed up / missed something, please correct me!)

You are totally right. If I remember well I didn't create any smart bones for this. Since the loops are so short and I wouldn't reuse the characters, I preferred to simply use bones + vector animation. Also, most of the rigging was done with "use selected bones for flexi-binding". The only exceptions were solid parts, such as heads or feet. In those cases, the points were bound to the bones.

For every character, I started rigging and animating a few vector layers. Like the t-rex here:

Once I was happy with the overall animation, I started adding details and also the texturing process.
Luckily that process was way simpler than I expected. I just used each part of the body as a mask and then used the freehand tool to draw vectors with brushes.
Once I attached those new texture layers to the bones with "use selected bones for flexi-binding", the textures were already 95% working.

The sauropod tail was a bit more complex in terms of textures. In that case I used one texture for the extended tail and another for the spiral shape. I had to adjust the vectors in many frames to make it work, but the Magnet tool helped to do it much easier.

Also, the only mesh used here is the one in the pterodactyl's wings. I didn't want to deal with the perspective there animating points by hand

I hope this makes sense!

[mmmaarten]

Thanks for the nice comments! ...

Haha, these are fun and put a smile on your face! Love this style!
Can imagine you wanted to animate these using vectors and had so much fun doing that!

[kenchtahm]

This is great! Love how much personality you got out of those little guys!

[sang820]

Wow~ Interesting sports dynamics! this is awesome victor

[pihms]

Awesome work! It really fits the characters.

[NanotechBeasts]

This is just adorable!!!