UPDATE (4/8/2021):
Bear Family Development
By Nicole Jansen
This milestone saw the most characters being implemented into the game at once yet. Although there were three members of the bear family to be present in the scene, their almost identical silouhettes meant a lot of development time could be cut down by reusing meshes and animation.
Concept Art
As mentioned previously, each member of the bear family was purposefully created with a similar silouhette. Not only would this let them appear related to one another, this would also cut down development time for these background NPCs.
Bruce Bear (Father)
Betty Bear (Mother)
Bobby Bear (Son)
Character Modeling
Firstly, the father bear model was built off of the base mesh using pieces from other models as applicable to speed up modeling time. The two other characters were modified from the father bear mesh through the use of object addition modeling techniques.
A base texture that could be applied to all three models was created for the purposes of optimization.
Animations
Since all three characters were built off of the same mesh and silhouette, the project's base rig could be applied to all three characters while only having it's actions animated once.
Bruce Bear Animations
Bruce Bear Animations
fatherIdle
fatherTalk
fatherBow
Betty Bear Animations
Betty Bear Animations
motherIdle
motherTalk
motherBow
Bobby Bear Animations
Bobby Bear Animations
sonBallThrow
sonIdle
sonSitIdle
Unity and Blend Trees
All characters and their necessary assets and rigs were imported into Unity to be given Blend Trees. They were then exported as a package and sent to the programmers of the project for final integration.