LogInThe project was created by Thiago Paulino in collaboration with Antoine Verney-Carron.
Senior Creature TD Thiago Paulino has unveiled the Triceratops Project, a highly-detailed, fully-simulated running Triceratops animation sequence that imagines how the creature's muscles could've worked when it still roamed the planet.
Created in collaboration with Senior Creature Artist Antoine Verney-Carron, who was responsible for modeling and texturing the dinosaur, the Triceratops was rigged using mGear as the rigging framework and then animated in Maya, with the artist using hippopotamus' and rhinos' movements as the main reference. Please note that the sequence was not meant to be anatomically-correct, as "according to the anatomical constraints, the Triceratops would not be able to trot".
The muscle simulation itself was made by using Ziva Dynamics' muscle setup, transferred from the Ziva Asset – Zeke the Lion. To perform the transfer, the author also utilized Wrap3D to re-shape the Base Mesh.
After generating the Alembic cache files for each stage, they were then ported into Unreal Engine 5, where the shaders were rebuilt using the maps provided by Antoine. According to Thiago, the rendering stage involved such steps as shading, lighting, scene elements setup, camera animation, scene animation, sequences setup, and rendering.
You can learn more about the project and check out Thiago's earlier works by visiting the artist's ArtStation page.
And if you want to learn more about setting up muscle simulations with Ziva, we also recommend checking out our interview with Anupam Awasthi, who recently shared some tips on how to make creature models in Ziva VFX and explained the process behind muscles and skin simulations for beginners.
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