Walking Dinosaur

Hi!

Walking quadruped, rig and animation exercise.

Model provided by IHMAN 3D School.

Comments welcome.

It looks as if he has no knee. The backward-bending joint on a quadruped is the ankle. The knee is above that. See the pic below.

If this is supposed to be a sauropod, it’s hind legs aren’t the style with a high ankle.

Also, you have opposite legs moving in unison. Quads don’t walk that way. Each leg leaves the ground at a different time. Study the work of Eadweard Muybridge. His animal studies can help with animal movement.

Steve S

Thanks for the references. However, the intention in this case was not anatomic realism, but smoothness and simplicity.

Good try, but dinosaurs don’t usually walk that way… they hop or walk with just 2 legs… And their arms are usually very short… Replace the head and the tail and make it a donkey, cow or dog… The foot movement will match that sort of animals. If you ignore the head and the tail and look just at the foot movement, it will look like any of those animals.

Try breaking up the action, get some overlap of joints going on… right now everything feels very linear.

did you use any video reference?

oh and anatomic realism is slightly important… you need to make sure your creature is always grounded in the real world. otherwise it always will look incorrect.

To add to the other crits:

What strikes me first is that the body slides along artificially in mid-air. It looks unreal - you have to animate for gravity and other forces. Gravity pushes the weight of the creature down and its legs push up against it. I’m not seeing that at all.

The hips and shoulders also seem to stay at the same point in Z. There’s no twist along the length of the body in the shoulders or hips - but shoulders and hips definitely twist in a quadruped walk as the weight changes from foot to foot.

Unfortunately we don’t really have dinosaurs anymore to watch but depending on how big you intend for him to be, you could look at elephants or dogs or horses or similar scale creatures for reference. Especially pay attention to how the shoulders and hips twist and move during the entire cycle.

You say you want “smoothness and simplicity”, and that’s all well and good, but you want to communicate the physical forces that people would expect to see, even if you’re not going to refine them to the point of realistic movement. It’s distractingly artificial when anything living seems to glide along in a straight line on rails - and it really doesn’t take too much effort to break that linear motion up.

Sorry but this is a terrible piece of crit. It’s probably fair to say that no animal living or dead ever walked like the dinosaur in this video but to say that all dinosaurs were bipeds is just plain wrong.

Actually, I did not want to discourage him… my intention was just to draw his attention to some things. And again… I said “usually” which means “most” dinosaurs, not all, walk or hop with just 2 legs. There are few who use 4 legs too.

If you do a quick search on Google, you will find mainly 2 types of dinosaurs:

1st Type (T. rex): 2 long legs, 2 short ones, large head, shorter tail & neck. They use 2 legs mostly.


2nd Type: 4 legs, long tail & neck, proportionately smaller head & shorter legs. The legs appear bit thick like an elephant’s leg.


The one on the video does not fit either of the two types. The legs are bit too long and skinny.

Anyway the person who posted this says that he has not made the model. But since he is rigging and animating, I thought it would be good to point these things to him.