Hamsters

For reference for my own hamster sphere idea I began collecting images and short Youtube videos showing hamsters and hamster balls (Reference sheet below). These helped me to see how a hamster in a hamster ball actually moves. With these I began to structure my own Maya hamster just using Polygon primitive spheres and trying not to worry about the topology at this stage.

                                       Reference photos

                                     Reference video

Making and creating the simple animation was not hard, there was a few things that I wanted to include in the animation but after learning that I would be unable to move the location of an object (or group’s) pivot I realised this was impossible. I came across the problem earlier when I tried to animate a simple waking gorilla made out of polygon primitives and I wanted to move the pivot point during the animation. Once the object/group was moved it would still rotate around the previous pivot point causing all the objects to disassociate.

With reference from the below photo I also began to construct a simplified hamster skeleton using Maya's 'bones'. I will add IK foot locks, ‘skin’ and animation to this at a later stage but it was helpful just to construct the skeleton and see how it would eventually move, from which joints and from which centres of gravity.

Hopefully this would be of great use in my final game-ready asset.