Caught

The idea

A Pagani hypercar in a dark hall of concrete pillars, where small robotic turrets crawl down the pillars like spiders as the car moves through. Light rakes through blinds, lasers sweep the vault, the car turns on a platform and the film ends in a red-lit finale. It runs 78 seconds and it is my most recent animation.

Made with my own tools

Caught was a test of my own pipeline from end to end. It is rendered in RenderForge, my GPU path tracer for Maya, and the creatures were rigged and animated with tools I wrote for the shot.

The turret crawler rig

I did not want to model tentacles or animate them by hand, so I wrote a crawler rig generator. It grows ten smooth, tapered tentacles out of the turret's underside. Each tentacle base is found by firing rays at the hull, so they sit on the body instead of floating beside it. Every tentacle is an IK-spline chain that stretches so its tip lands exactly on its foot control, and the tube mesh is generated along the bent chain so it never twists. A Deploy dial unfolds the tentacles from tucked inside the body to planted on the ground, and the three modelled legs got their own IK rigs too.

Feet that stick to anything

I animate one body control and the rig works out the steps. A bake pass fires a ray from each foot's home along the creature's own down axis, not world down, which is what lets it walk straight down a pillar. A planted foot stays still until the body drags it too far, then it lifts, arcs along the surface and plants at the new hit. The gait emerges from that rule instead of a fixed pattern.

Measured, not eyeballed

• Floor walk: feet perfectly still in 89% of foot-frames, median gap to the surface 0.00.
• Wall climb: all 13 feet (10 tentacles + 3 legs) stayed on the vertical pillar face.
• Tentacle tips land on their foot targets within about 3% of the tentacle's length.

The hard part

The turret had to shrink to 5% of its size to fit the pillar scene, and that exposed a classic double-transform bug: the skinned tentacles received the rig's scale twice and collapsed into the body. The fix was to keep skinned geometry under a group that never moves and let the joints carry the rig's transform. I locked it in with tests that measure the actual mesh vertices at 100%, 25% and 5% scale.