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| Jerboa Perspective View |
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| Polygon and Normal Jerboa Side View |
For my second semester project, I decided to make a project combining animals with the low-polygon art style. I have seen various low-poly animals on several websites and decided to make my own animated take on it. Most of the animals I saw being used were common animals like dogs, cats, and birds, but I wanted to use an animal not well known to the public. Then I thought about using a jerboa, a rodent sometimes known as the kangaroo rat for its long tail and legs. This rodent also hops like a kangaroo, making the jerboa very cute and odd from the other rodents.
After my jerboa pitch came in, I drew my jerboa designs in my sketchbook by looking at various images and videos to reference from. Once that was done, I made a low-polygon version of the jerboa by dissecting the jerboa's basic joints and body parts to make outlines of only straight lines so the jerboa could have a geometric appearance.
STORYBOARD
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| Storyboard Concept |
Above here is a potential storyboard that I thought of with my jerboa. In here, the jerboa lives in the desert and is running for his life being chased by an owl. I eventually scrapped this idea since I wanted to focus on the jerboa and its polygon form, not how it lives in its environment. This storyboard was inspired by this
video form BBC Earth. I will also be using this video as a reference for animating my jerboa.
COLOR PALETTE
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| Jerboa Test Sketch |
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| Color Palette |
To the right is my color palette I designed on
Paletton. I chose two complimentary colors and picked different shades of purple and yellow from my palette. I chose a dark purple to represent the night sky and a light cream-yellow color to represent the jerboa fur. These different shades allow one color to not stand out too strong against the other, and maintain a good balance.
With these colors, I made a test sketch from one of my original sketches to see how these colors would work together. I think the colors are a perfect match!
KEYFRAMING
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| Jerboa Keyframes |
After gathering my colors, I formed keyframes from the bionic kangaroo picture down below from
Serious Wonder. I chose a kangaroo to reference from with leg movements because their leg movements closely resemble how a jerboa hops.
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| Bionic Kangaroo |
ROUGH DRAFT
Once all the keyframes and sketches were created, I combined them into an animation. These keyframes are in the process of being outlined and have smooth in-between frames. I plan to have this project finished by April or May.
