Baba Yaga

It took me a week to get the main movement of the house ready. There was a lot of tweaking and playing with curves to make it look right and smooth. I still see an issue when the animation loops. There is a bit of a jump when it reaches the end however, I will smooth it out in the engine. Now I will have a look into animating the props. All of the hanging objects have to swing while the house moves. There was an idea to make the sway animation in the engine with a rope physics, however I would have to keep all of the props separate and I would also have to create separate rigs for each object. In this case, while I had my rig already created, I choose to make the animation in 3Ds Max manually. I started with windows. Since the house is bent forward, I want to keep the front window shutters open and sway from one side to another. At the back window, shutters are closed because the house doesn't bend to the back. However, whenever the leg touches the ground, each shutter will jump ...

My model is finally rigged, skinned and ready for animation. I would like to animate a basic walk cycle; however, since there are a lot of hanging objects, this process will be time-consuming. By creating this animation, I want to add a lot of character and personality to the house. I think that the key is to show the heaviness and instability of the building, by making the whole building swing from one side to another and placing foot heavily on the ground. There are many ways to create animation. I could use the Unreal animation system; however, I am familiar with 3Ds Max, this is why I choose this software. I started by making a basic leg movement. I searched plenty of websites and found multiple videos of a chicken walking, I also spent some time observing how birds walk in real life. I found one video with an animated chicken model in side view, so I was able to pick up the key poses. At first, I established key poses where the hips are at the highest and lowest point. Ther is o...

Skinning is the next part of preparing the model for animation. I have to adjust each vertex to be controlled by corresponding bones, so the mesh will bend correctly. To make my life easier, I decided to keep the model with separate meshes, which means that I haven't merged the whole model into one mesh. This allows me to paint weight on separate objects, so I don't need to worry about selecting the wrong vertices when painting. I merged the house with the bottom platform, and soil into one mesh, because it is going to be controlled by a single bone. Legs are separate as well as herbs, ropes, talismans and bigger roots. I also kept roof and root planes separate as I am planning to use a cloth physics inside Unreal. It should give me a nice subtle effect of moving roots. I added a skin modifier for each mesh and select the bones which are going to control each part . I started with the legs since this is the most complex object. Because I created the rig correctly, the default...