Shark Rig

When modelling the shark I used quiet a few images that I had picked up in the primary research section of the project, which I thought, would be enough for me to be able to create a decent model that would be somewhat look life like but I was really wrong. My model looked like a squashed toilet roll with some triangles pulled out. I put a few hours into that model trying to make it look round and more life like but with not avail.

Later on when I got the model from online I could tell the differences between the two and where I had gone wrong. The main problem with my model was I wasn’t looking at it being circular more of a semi circle, which made it so I was losing a lot of the shark’s density and bulk about the model.

I had no major problems with rigging the model. Thought I did waste a lot of time trying out different skeletons when I had made probably the best one on my first try. I left some of the experiments in the project just in case I had some spare time at the end so I could experiment with them using deformers and maybe placing a few IK handles on it. Overall I would say the rig was good for the knowledge I knew at the time but now I know about IK splines, which would give my model a more curvy and wavy movement, and its main use is for that kind of thing. When weight painting the shark it didn’t need much doing it too it just making some of the dorsal fins stop influencing certain places. The animation was simply but easy until I tried to do an attack animation where everything seems to crash down on me. This is where I realised that I should have made the tail a separate thing and makes it more like a pair of hips than just have it all combined together.