UPDATE (3/25/2021):
Skeleton Character Development
By Nicole Jansen
In order to make the cave scene easier to navigate through, a skeleton guide was created to point the player in the right direction of where to go.
Concept Art
The skeleton was crafted to reside in the dark and spooky cave game scene. His design was kept simple, taking inspiration from the round silhouette the other characters in the game have.
Character Modeling
This character required an entirely new mesh because of it's difference in silhouette. This distinctiveness should also help the character stand out amongst the others in the game while indicating both an innate eeriness and puzzle-based significance. It was scaled appropriately in accordance to another character for easy integration.
Animations
Because of the skeleton's unique mesh, a new rig was created. A heavy focus was set on parenting different bones to each other to allow the floating limbs seen in the original concept art. Though weight paints had to be applied by hand, this approach allowed the full range of animation that was needed for this particular character.
As this character model would be placed into the scene multiple times to create the suggestion of many skeletons within the cave, a multitude of animations were created to provide the programmers with a wide option of poses for variety in integration. Some actions that are assigned to the model are completely still, while others feature slight idle movements. Pointing animations were created for the purpose of the skeleton acting as a guide, and they were mirrored to allow accurate direction-giving despite possible variations in placement.
Skeleton Animations
Skeleton Animations
Skeleton Sit Idle
Skeleton Sit Idle Two
Skeleton Sit Point Left
Unity and Blend Trees
The skeleton was exported as an .fbx file and imported into Unity to be given a proper Blend Tree for integration. A final package containing the model, animations, and Blend Tree was exported and sent out to the rest of the team for integration within the game scene.