Looking to practice some skills, I set about trying to emulate the style of animation and modeling from a pre-existing propriety. And my mind decided to settle onto onto the cute and deliciously round style of Animal Crossing !

Pre-production : Research, Study & Planning

Pre-production is all about figuring who, what, when and that's precisely what I did. I was pretty set onto making a new species of villager rather than creating new textures for a pre-existing one. The question then became What Animal will be crossing my Island exactly ?

After some research, it seemed that the most requested new species were Capybaras and Bats. I settled for the latter, as I was worried about the capybara ending up looking too much like the already-existing hippos. And also because bats are really fun.

Production : Modeling, Texturing & Animating (*ding*)

Now with a roadmap, time to start up the engine, and onto bringing to life this bat I go

The modeling was pretty straightforward. I tried to maintain the same topology as the in games model when similar. The wings are not found onto any character so I had free reign to model them as simply as possible while keeping in mind that they will have to bend at the elbow. No wrists needed for an Animal Crossing villager!

Texturing is a fun part (we'll keep the UV Unwrapping under the rug). And when it comes to Animal Crossing the process offers a lot of liberties ! The design rules of the game are pretty loose. Because I like stars and non realistic villagers, I went for a space bat vibe, with purple as a main colour and sprinkled some stars around the texture.

I worked in Illustrator to allow for easy up/down scaling of the textures offered by vector.

Don't forget the toe beans!

Animating to make this little bat come to life, onto Maya we move (pun intended). While I create my bones and do weight painting in Blender, I animate in Autodesk Maya. For this shot 3 animations were needed : a bouncy Idle animation both looking up at the camera and looking straight ahead, the transition between those two and a little hello.

I typically work with a layered workflow, rather than a standart blocked to spline pose-to-pose animation, especially for such simple animations