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Creature animations done for the mobile RPG rhythm game Valz (iOS) by Klappanome Studio where I worked as the main animator for 3-4 years.
These "Valz" Monsters are supposed to be corrupted musical instruments, and thus many of them has musical elements such as chimes, strings or drums.
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The graphics are painted by our Illustrator.
I am tasked with splitting, rigging and animating his stylish, grungy illustration which was a very interesting and exciting challenge.
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I initially used After Effects and apply the animation in Unity as a spritesheet,
but in the later assets and cutscenes I have learned to do the animation in-engine within Unity.
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In total there are 48 creatures that I had to animate, many of them comes with their own individual challenges, such as tentacle, loose wires, cloth, vibrating/rotating part, and even special effects such as flame, smoke, bullets, and sound waves. You can see these animations implemented in-game in the game's trailer here.
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Software : After Effects | Unity
DOCUMENTATION
Our Illustrator supplies us with these stylish, intricate single-piece drawings.
It is then my job to split apart these drawings into separate parts by figuring out which parts should move independently from each other, then re-paint the cut part using similar-looking brush and color to keep their shape solid.
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I also paint additional effects, such as the rotation smear as I find necessary, while also keeping the original illustrator's style.
The whole process takes part in Photoshop. I then export these models with the separated parts as layers.
In After Effects, the rigging is done using the plugin duIK.
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Morphing and warping is also used for things like slight angle change or facial expressions.
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There are also some that requires special challenges that requires knowledge in coding Expressions. One of my favorite would be this accordion monster. In order to rig it, I had to separate every each section of its bellows body, then input this expression into those parts with different values based on its position in relation to the head and tail parts. The result is a 2D rig that allows the bellows to stretch and compress naturally.
Each monster comes with 4-5 animation states : Idle, Attack, Status, Impact/death, and for some special ones, there's a Combo state.
Idle
Attack
Status
Impact/Death
Some of the monster is designed by merging together a number of different ones into an amalgamate.
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I make this by separating parts from the original monster and sticking them into another monster's base as a composition, and then matching their frame count.
Here's just a couple others with their different states and unique effects :
Lastly, these are some of the bosses, that fittingly has the most complex animations :
