Zixxtrixx
snake
The first creature, from two concept sheets by S. Hofer. One continuous tube that bulges more and more toward the end, culminating in a head -- no separate skull, exactly as the side sheet draws it -- authored by eye, wearing a continuous 128x256 crayon atlas quilted from the same scans. Twenty-six bones. He has one trick. He also has eight tricks.
The canonical S: front reared, middle dipped, tail carried high. Five things happen at once on different periods -- the whole S gathers and releases on a 3.2 s breath, the animal bobs vertically, the body swells in girth, the tail sways, and the grounded run now SNAKES SIDEWAYS in a slow travelling S (the part that used to just stand there). The head rises with the in-breath on its own bone. The sideways wave turns about the true world vertical by quaternion conjugation, so the authored millimetres of belly sink survive it exactly.
Locomotion is vertical and longitudinal, not lateral: an arch travels down the body, the middle rises and bunches, the rear is drawn forward. The head and neck bob with it. A small roll survives as secondary life at a fraction of the vertical authority. The camera is deliberately fixed -- a gait has to be legible before an orbit is allowed anywhere near it.
Zixxtrixx does not bite. He compresses, rolls into a wheel, somersaults three times while climbing to a twelve-metre apex, hangs there a beat longer than gravity would like -- the owner asked for that hang, for effect -- then straightens into a rigid spear and drives eleven metres down one straight 30-degree line. The tip bites 420 mm into the ground and STAYS for five full seconds before the pull-out closes the loop.
Helpless, and finally LOOSE: the S is no longer mandatory. Per-joint stance authority swings between 16% and 84% on one slow loop-exact cycle that travels down the body, so the animal stretches almost straight, collapses into a distorted curve, and the recognisable S only RECURS -- while the whole body turns about its own centre, head-down at the half and back up by the end. Wobble, not jitter: fewer and slower terms, never more and faster.
The S snaps tighter -- the same lever as the breath, pushed hard -- while the head whips back and aside with the first neck joints carrying a third of the whiplash. One damped overshoot, and the canonical S is back inside 0.6 s. Both ends of the clip sit on the rest pose, so the hard cut into and out of any other clip lands clean.
Two slow shudders, and the S drains out of the body: every slope slides toward a lying pose whose centreline follows the animal's own taper -- a corpse's head rests one head-radius up, its thin tail lower -- while a computed constraint keeps the planted rear exactly where it stood and the carried front comes down to the dirt. It keels onto its flank, the tail curls once and lets go, and the last second is deliberately almost still. Stillness after motion is what reads as death.
He gathers onto his planted tail, stretches up toward vertical -- ALMOST the attack's rigid spear, but effortful, wobbling, never quite straight, which is the joke -- fights for the balance, loses it, and topples flat with an authored ground bite before getting back up into the S. The root is enforced from a hand-keyed fork-height curve, so the stunt genuinely pivots on the tail, and the enforcement absorbing the wobble is what keeps the foot planted through the fight.
The head-aim rig performed: the body idles on a quiet half-breath while the head turns left, glances up, turns right, dips down and comes home -- eased, with a tiny overshoot at each arrival, the first two neck joints following softly so the turn reads at the neck of an animal that has none. The head is the ROOT bone in this rig, so the aim lives on the dedicated skull bone: the same channel the sim will one day use to make him watch you.
Earlier passes, newest first. Every one of these was the creature at the time, and each is kept with what was wrong with it -- the record is the point.
The canonical S, breathing on four incommensurate periods. The motion was right and was frozen -- what dates this pass is the surface it moved: a flat-shaded 4,370-triangle tube, an indexed page sampled nearest so the crayon reads as pixels, and a dorsal pink narrowed to a thin stripe to compensate for a camera pitch that had already been fixed.
The caterpillar gait and the head-bob, both frozen and carried forward unchanged. Same surface as the idle above, and the same flat face: at the eye stations the skull was 1.97 times as wide as it was tall, which is a disc, not a head.
Three overhead somersaults into a rigid spear. The trajectory, the 12-metre apex, the aligned plunge and the impact shake are all frozen. Kept because it is the pass that proved the animation system works while the head was at its worst.
The corkscrew after it was slowed down -- three fast incommensurate terms per joint had read as vibration rather than as a body yielding. Fewer and slower, not more and faster.
Kept deliberately. Ten independent rigid cylinders at six sides and about 450 vertices, a horizontal ground-snake silhouette, and colours taken as the MEDIAN of each crayon region -- which is the pigment lightened by however much paper showed through, and was then hand-saturated to compensate. The orange was deleted outright to fit a 256-colour GIF palette. This is what the creature looked like when an export format was allowed to decide its shape.
The tail rose to vertical and came back down behind the animal, because the per-joint rotation was rear-weighted and the accumulated turn was therefore a fifth of what it looked like on paper. The joints also switched between two rotation axes on a magnitude threshold, which popped as they crossed. Both are fixed; this is the record.