Snail Animation?

The organic models how’n to rigging and animate ?


Snails would be about the easiest thing in the world to animate I would think. They have nothing but eye stalks and a mouth.

How’n to rigging? bone? shape?

Here’s a pick. I tested it and it works pretty well. There is probably a better way for doing this, but this way will work. I’m not very good with rigging so I have no experience with making the mouth move or drivers or any of that. Just add a line of bones up each eye stalk and parent them to the body bones so they will move with the body. You just have to think of a mesh as a series of hotspots where it will bend. Make sure you have enough geometry for it to do so without distorting the mesh. Every part of the body you want to move independently needs its own bone(s). I find rigging terribly tedious so I don’t do it often.


You can also do a lot with shape keys, when it comes to animating snails resp. slugs, as the mesh deformation doesn’t have to be very well defined, it can be more like a jelly cake.