Animating the Dinosaur

Despite it not being the model I would have liked, I am proud of the animation I managed to achieve. I tried to make sure I was including enough weight to the dinosaur to make it feel real. It had to feel like it was really stomping along in the woods. We tried to add curving motion in the tail, but due to issues in the model, this wasn't possible without it breaking. I think the up, down and side to side movement works well enough to have some form of visual interest in the tail however. 

There were some issues with moving the chest as well. If I moved the arms or neck, the chest would warp and break in unnatural ways. I tuned back any movement that caused this error to at least still have some movement of that area of it's body. 

These kinds of issues could have been avoided if we had spent more time searching for a model and rigging. I managed to work around these issues, but they were troublesome. I have significantly increased my confidence in maya animation through doing this. 

Also, using 360 degree HDRI images made lighting so much easier and more accurate. These consisted of many high dynamic range images stitched together in a spherical fashion. Since I don't have a 360 camera, I had to do this my camera just taking a picture every 45 degrees or so, and on different tilts. This, and the stitching process, were rather painstaking, however they yield the best results.