Unit 12 & the Jellyfish in Motion
10th of April 2026
In this unit I will discover the fundamentals of Jellyfish movement in water.
The fascinating and simple organism is made of 95% of water and of circular muscles instead of bones. With the help of these muscles they push water out of their body to drive themselves forward and to coordinate in water. Thanks to their flexible body, with every powerful push they create vortexes which pull their bell shaped body further, making them the most efficient swimmers.
With this lesson I will explore techniques how to capture their fluidity, flexibility, transparency and pulsing motion.
The rig I will use for this project is Jelly rig and it used to be available on Animation Buffet for free. It is a great little rig with easy to use controls. I will follow the hands on tutorial created by Alexander Williams to achieve a realistic motion cycle.
As usual, I start my work with looking at live action references.
The first step was to setup the rig and adjust its pose a bit. I struggled to apply the texture at the beginning. The source images were in the right folder but I still couldnt apply it to the jelly. After some research I identified that the issue was the broken texture path, so I had to fix that. I selected the File Path Editor (Windows > General Editors > File Path Editor). Then Identify broken paths, where a list of files come up with red 'X's showing the missing files. I selected the broken files and selected Repath.
Once my jelly was ready, I setup the timeliner for a 33 frames long cycle. The process and the thumbnail sketches are based on the 'squash & stretch' and 'up & down' positions of the body and the limbs.
The cycle was quiet simple and I managed it quiet quickly. It was a bit more complicated to acheiev the looping cycle. Once the infinity curves were turned on, the jelly restarted the cycle after every 32 frames from the original start position. So I had to go to Translate Y in the graph editor, and amending its curves and to turn them into one transending line. As I also added more frames, I also had to copy & Paste some of them.
My intention was to import further jellys and make the scene a bit more fun, however, I struggled with process of offsetting their motion so they wouldnt be in sync.
At this point, I left only one jelly in this initial video, while I do some research and further develop this little production.
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