Animation marathon

This week has been mostly about animating. First of was “Snappy” our alligator snapping turtle boss. Two attacks and a walking animation as we’re doing on most of our characters. In the first attack he swings a huge mace one handed and the other attack is a ground stomp as shown below. I worked in Motionbuilder and uses as few keyframes as I could (as more always seems to mess it up) and make them as powerful as I could. 

His rig is based on a CAT-rig human but as he’s less mobile than a human the skinning took some time and certain poses can cause some stretching. Fortunately he is so huge and slow there wasn’t need for elaborated animations with lots of movements. This character is one of the only ones that doesn’t run but has a walk animation. Since this was only a rough animation for Alpha I didn’t put too much time on it but for the Beta I want the walk to really show how heavy he is. 

Next was the Forest minion, a gnome like creature that lives in the forest. I modeled it in 3ds max which went pretty painless, even the skinning worked out pretty well. When it came to animating this character has a slight comical feel to it so I wanted to switch the attack animations up a little. First animation is a jump attack where he uses his whole body to swing his “scythe” over his head. The second attack is a twirl attack. He also has a jog animation where his weapon was the biggest problem since it’s so long and he is quite short. It does have some minor clipping through the ground that will be fixed later. The biggest problem this week was importing the forest minion to Unity. His faces are flipped and I’ve gone through almost every tutorial I’ve found on google to solve it but nothing works. I’ll save that for Monday..