Sabre Tooth Tiger – Textured walk cylce – Completed on TV series “Primeval2″

Sabre Walk Cycle from Jonathan Symmonds on Vimeo.

Scorpion Walk Cycle – Completed on TV series “Primeval2″

Scorpion Walk Cycle from Jonathan Symmonds on Vimeo.

Sabre Tooth Tiger – No Texture Walk Cylce – “Primeval2″

Untitled from Jonathan Symmonds on Vimeo.

Mammoth Walk Cycle – “Primeval2″

Mammoth Walk Cycle from Jonathan Symmonds on Vimeo.

Mercreature Walk Cycle – “Primeval2″

Mercreature Wlak Cycle from Jonathan Symmonds on Vimeo.

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Rex is by far the most popular character on the show! Every animator wants to get a shot with him to say they have animated him. This shot was pretty straight forward, the only trouble i had with this and some other shots on the show was trying to get our cg characters eyelines to meet up with the actors. I can’t believe that the whole show was shot without reference to where the eyeline of the CG characters were! I mean come on!!!!

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This sequence of shots needed to be put through the pipeline very quickly. The brief required lots of aggression and panic. So i animated every possible controller i could get my mouse pointer on! When the textures arrived on the characters it started coming together and looked amazing in the final shots.

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This was again great fun to work on. Getting the jump just right took a while. At first i had too many steps to catch the G-Rex when he landed, but soon i realized with the stride of a creature that size, it needed much  less. I even animated the helicopter which is fake

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Great shot this! This character was one of my favourites. The G-Rex actually existed and was bigger than any other dinosaur. It was taller than a boeing 747 and required a much slower and heavier approach to animating. Being so heavy getting the weight right was tricky but once you nailed it, with the textures on it looks fantastic!

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This shot was so complicated that it nearly got cut! There is a piece of metal that supposedly gets knocked over by the Dragorex but if that was to happen the timing of the shot wouldn’t have worked because the Dragorex would have caught up to the actor much earlier. It kept going back and forth from Comp to animation but after a week or two i managed to make the animation work with the metal bar. (kind of!)

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This is another long shot i did. The walk cycle is on a path that is curved and banked to enable the Diactodron to stop and speed up over time. Increasing the curve on the motion path increases the timing of the cycle. The head and tail i animated separately.

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I animated these characters with refernce to my puppy that i had just bought. The brief was to make them “cute” so i studied and filmed my dog and used his quick movements and wiggly tail to make these small creatures have their own personalities.

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This shot took a week or so to complete. I had to break the rigs in places to get the Diactodrons to flip over which caused a lot of trouble between the riggers and myself! I am very proud of this shot, i think it works really well timing wise.