All hail the sphere

Now we've been given our design brief and it's an interesting one. Our point of reference and of inspiration is http://www.cgsphere.com/. There are a lot of excellent idea on there which only seem to be limited by the artists imagination, unfortunately mine would need to be limited by my skills as unlike many of the submissions on cgsphere, my sphere would need to be animated. Hopefully though this would be a boon rather than a handicap.

I came up with a number of sphere-centric ideas...

1) Telepods as seen in the 1986 movie 'The Fly'
2) Tadpole in jelly egg.
3) Franken-sphere
4) Chimera sphere- with two animals becoming a sphere-like splice
5) Alien invasion of earth
6) Circus bear/elephant on a ball
7) Hedgehog going into a ball
8) HG Well's' Time machine a la the George Pal version
9) Hamster ball

Some of these ideas I liked visually as they would look very imaginative but would unfortunately show very little in terms of rigging/animation such as the Franken-sphere, the tadpole and the alien invasion of earth and since this was a task set to show our rigging and animation skills and not how creative we could be, those ideas were put on the scrap pile. Other ideas would show some animation but not a lot of rigging, such as the Time Machine so this was put on the scrap pile as well and I focussed on the ones I had remaining. That left...

Telepods from 'The Fly'
Hedgehog
Circus bear/elephant on a ball
Hamster ball

The Telepods would be a great animation but would be complicated to rig and animate, I would need four animated components:  The Pod, a person, the fly and the 'Brundlefly'. This would be arduous and a lot more technical and time-consuming but it would look excellent if I could achieve it.

The hedgehog would be a simple (I think) process to achieve but may not show enough in terms of rigging and animating.

The circus bear/elephant on a ball would be less complicated and would look great as would the Hamster ball, though the Hamster ball would have an aspect which as yet I was not sure how (if at all) I could achieve and that was transparency.

For practice I began work on creating simple models in Maya of the ideas to help me visualize and to see how complex they would really be...
                              

                     Maya Telepod                                          The Fly telepod