Overview
The kraken's tentacles are the whole problem. Eight long, tapering limbs need to deform smoothly along their length, curl convincingly at the tip, and stay art-directable rather than simulated — an animator has to be able to pose them.
I built the rig around ribbon IK. Doing that setup by hand for every tentacle showed how much of it was repetitive, and after the project I turned the process into the Ribbon IK Plugin.
The project was a team production finished in three months and entered in The Rookies Award 2024.
Contribution
- Rigging: built and iterated the full creature rig through production.
- Animation and directing: animated the creature and directed the piece.
- VFX, post-process and the environment, all in Unreal Engine 5.
What I took from it
The project gave me hands-on experience with complex model rigging, and with cutting repetitive work by replacing manual steps with procedural solutions. The tentacle rig is where that approach started, and it is the origin of my Ribbon IK plugin for Maya.