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Jellyfish Animation

Project: Creative Animation (Course Assessment)

Year: 2007

3D Information:

Jellyfish:	NURBS Cuves
Animation:	Mesh Morphing, Animated NURBS

The jellyfish animation was a project designed to test my abilities in advanced animation techniques. I went further by making use of NURBs for modeling and fog effects.

The Jellyfish is rigged in a unique way. The main body of the jellyfish is a NURBs Curve animated by morphing the mesh. I had target meshes for out and in, forward and backward, and added them together to create a slow pulsing effect.

The tentacles were animated by duplicating the curve used to build their shape, and adding control points along the curve to set keyframes to. All the tentacles are based on the one animated curve.

Once the parts of the jellyfish were moving correctly, I added an animation of the jellyfish moving forward and backward, and then added all of this to a motion path. This makes the jellyfish "speed up" and "slow down" as it floats along the path.