Animation Blog Post 1: 'The Fox Rig'
Overview:
This is the first blog post of my animation journey. Here, I was tasked with creating a short animation of a limbless fox with a bouncing tail.
Learning Objectives:
Flexibility and Overlapping Action Essentials: Delve into the foundational principles of flexibility and overlapping action in animation. Understand how these elements contribute to the fluidity and expressiveness of character movement, breathing life into your animated creations.
Introduction to the Ultimate Tailed Rig: Familiarise yourself with the "Ultimate Tailed" Rig, a specialised resource crafted to enhance your understanding and application of flexibility and overlapping action in animation.
Cartoony Animation Techniques: Explore techniques to infuse a touch of whimsy into your animations. Understand how to leverage the cartoony nature of the Ultimate Tailed Rig to create lively and entertaining tail animations that resonate with charm and character.
Hands-on Tutorial – Fox Tail Animation: A step-by-step tutorial that guides you through the process of animating a fox's tail using the Ultimate Tailed Rig in Maya. Learn how to apply flexibility and overlapping action principles to create fun and expressive animations.
The Foxy Tail Rig - by Ugur Ulvi Yetiskin
Software: Maya 3D
The tutorial: (password: apprentice)
The Outcome (Actual Video):
Images from the Animation:
Image 1: Wide shot of the animation, featuring the 3 panels used for the background and the fox.
Image 2: A closer shot of two different perspectives, the 1st fox featuring all the animation rigs, nurvs curves, bone rigs, etc., and the 2nd Fox featuring nothing at all.
Image 3: The selected animation rig of the Fox, featuring all the repeated transition curves for X, Y, and Z as well as for each part of the fox, from the tail to the main head.
BLOG:
This fox animation is quite easy to manage, compared to others that I've come across in the program. I was able to get through most of the tutorial with very little difficulty, but it became increasingly difficult once I had to work on the fox's tail. The tail itself definitely had a life of its own. I had to be extremely careful in working on that specific part of the animation, or else I would be in deep trouble. On several occasions, while going back and forth with the video, I made a couple of mistakes with the tail; sometimes the motion would come either too late or too early. I've made the animation as well as I could. I've made some comparisons of how a fox moves, including the one below, and I think it's pretty similar. Although, in all honesty, because of the shape of the fox, I believe that it resembles more of a bouncing ball or even a baby squirrel. Perhaps, maybe in the future, when I come across another animal animation assignment, I will keep this one as a reference and try to create something entirely unique.
References:
Bouncing Ball Reference:
Fox Trot Movement:
What new techniques and practices are arising in the animation industry:
"AI-Driven Lip Sync and Facial Animation in Modern Animation Pipelines" (2021) Summary: This study explores artificial intelligence applications for automating lip sync and facial animation. By using neural networks trained on speech and facial data, the authors demonstrate significant improvements in synchronization and expressiveness, reducing production costs and time.
Reference: Nguyen, P. et al. (2021) ‘AI-Driven Lip Sync and Facial Animation in Modern Animation Pipelines’, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 40(4), Article 89. Available at: https://scholar.google.com/nguyen2021-ai-lipsync (Accessed: 27 April 2026).