I’m sure many of you all have seen organic-looking movement among creatures or players in games. I decided to give it a go myself and hopefully learn some lessons I can use elsewhere. I must give props to RujiK for inspiring me to learn about this.

Dynamic motion can come in all shapes and sizes: hair, tails, chains, arms, legs, etc. I am going to talk about a simple simulation of a lizard.

The lizard follows your mouse cursor and his body segments organically follow him.

The idea is quite simple, for the body and tail, we have nodes which continuously follow the node directly before it with a specified distance in between. This is practically the same algorithm for making a chain. The legs and feet are a bit more complicated. The feet take steps when they are “stretched” beyond a certain threshold, then placed perpendicular to the head and base of the leg.

I hope to use this organic movement for something in the future!