As we implement new creatures and characters to fill in the game world, they would also need some basic idle and walking animations. Yao would be animating the animations for the creatures, and Janle would be in charge of the tribes people.
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In our alpha build, we've included 3 creatures: felivege (veggie feline) and the saurus family. The walking animation for them was pretty rough, as I don’t have much experience in animating using bone rigs. I initially thought to use IK on the rigging for the feathered saurus would be nice to position its leg movements, but sadly that didn't work out. It’s noticeable in the prototype that in its walk cycle, the leg twitches all over the place as the IK bone doesn’t function how I expected for the saurus’ leg bones. I will readjust a new walking cycle for it and felivege, together making idle and walking animations for all the other creatures we’ve added into the game.
For each idle and walking animation, I tried to have them be somewhat special from one another. Whilst the walking animation may be keyframe cycles as would’ve expected, the idle animation would be the one that presents their characteristics more according to different species variant.
I enjoyed making the idle animations more, together with an experimental attempt for the walking animation of the wastescur dino which it moves by digging underground and travel from there.
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To implement basic NPCs into the game, they have to have a walking animation. For the tribespeople, I have created a simple walking animation along with blinking. Since the model has a metarig, all the bones and its IK are all generated for me, which I then used to pose the model. For the blinking I utilised shape keys to make the eyes blink.
However, due to the current state of our game being unoptimised and with a chance of the sketchbook bugging out when the frames drop due to the number of objects in the scene, we decided to not include the NPCs for now.
The reasons are: