Enemy Plant (Greg)

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  Rig (front view)

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  Rig (back view)

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  Deformation bones (front view)

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  Deformation bones (back view)

Gregory

Greg was a spontaneous creation. During the first evening of the game jam, I began working on him right after the brainstorm session with the team. Using whatever knowledge and skills that I had at the time, I managed to create Greg from scratch in one evening, and he quickly became team's favorite enemy character.

The Rig

The rig for Greg features controllers for the jaw hinging and unhinging, many controls for the spine (or, in this case, stem), 6 legs each set up with inverse kinematics, a floppy tongue, and controls for every leaf on Greg's body. One challenge that I ran into was rigging his jaw and teeth because the weight painting wasn't very cooperative at first, but it was more of a minor inconvenience than a giant hurdle. The rest of the rigging process went smoothly.

Animation

The first thing you may have noticed is the framerate. The character was deliberately animated with missing frames to give it a claymation or a stop-motion look. This allowed me to exaggerate the movement and simplify the animation, which was crucial due to time constraints of the game jam.

Because Greg is such a unique creature, animating him presented a few challenges. Greg was tricky to animate because he has 6 legs, which is 4 more than humans usually have. Most of the time went into animating his walk cycle, where I made sure that his leg movements made sense to how a 6-legged creature (like an insect) would move. To give him more personality, his body bobs left and right when he walks, his tongue flops around when he moves and attacks, and his eyes bounce all over the place.

The animation that I had the most fun making was the death animation. The first iteration was pretty static, but after I decided to go with the style of broken frames, I was able to create a death animation where his body spun out of control that looks dynamic, but still feels natural.

Finally, his animations for getting hit. They may look simple when isolated, but in the engine, they add on top of whatever animation is currently playing, whether he's walking or biting. There are two hit animations where he flinches left and right, and the direction alternates each time Greg is hit by a bullet. This hit animation really ties the character together in the game.

What's next for Greg

Greg currently exists as one of the three enemies for a game jam game called Midnight Harvest. Our team is currently continuing work on this game post-jam. This means that in the future, Greg might receive even more unique animations!

Built With

• blender
• unity