I finished off the last of the final boss animations which are the hand thump, phase 2 spin and alt spin.

The hand thump animation is shown below:

I was mainly inspired by the Bouldergeist from Super Mario Galaxy with the hand attacks:

This is because it’s one of the most similarly structured bosses (the other being Squizzard from Super Mario Galaxy 2) compared to the final boss in our game in the sense it’s a stationary being with 2 hands and no legs and uses said hands to attack. The idea of the hand thump is that, in phase 2, the boss is very angry with the player for lowering its health to a certain point so it just tries to crush the player like a bug instead of swiping at the player in phase 1, and I feel that my animation conveys the boss’s anger pretty well. I was planning on having the hands go “thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump” instead of this one which is “thump, thump, thump, thump” but remembered that this is a boss fight for the tutorial level so it can’t be too tricky to dodge as it’s not a late-game boss, especially since this attack needs to be dodged alongside the eye beam attack and the spins with projectiles so this attack should be easier to dodge compared to them as phase 2 does need to be a bit more difficult than phase 1 in terms of attacks but not too much of an increase in difficulty.

The phase 2 spin and alt spin animations are shown below:

The idea behind these attacks is that they deal more damage compared to the phase 1 spin attack, since its head acts as a cannon that shoots projectiles which the player has to dodge. To act as a visual cue for which projectiles are being aimed at the player, the boss would either spin with its arms out like in phase 1, or have its arms raised in the air. I like that both phase 2 spin attacks are visually distinct from each other based on arm placement so the player knows what projectiles are about to be sent their way, plus I enjoy the detail of the head visibly moving to shoot the projectiles and it’s not just a stationary head as this would give another visual distinction compared to the phase 1 spin attack which didn’t have the top of the head moving. I also love the secondary animation of the back arms that are trapped in the wood plank that move as the head goes up and down to shoot the projectiles as they’re connected to the head. The projectiles are planned to be used with particle effects in Unreal Engine. The Robo Patrick boss fight I mentioned for the phase 1 spin attack a few weeks ago was the same reference used for these spins, only this time with the inclusion of projectile attacks from the head instead of Patrick’s ice cream, so I’ll not talk about it again here:

Unfortunately, the boss fight was scrapped late in development because there just wasn’t enough time for it to be implemented as other areas of the level including enemy ai needed polished and there wasn’t time to do both the boss and polish existing aspects of the level. I’m still proud of the progress I’ve made with the boss animations though as, even though they’re not in the game, they all came out quite well.

I then painted the skin weights of the new wolf rigs I made using Advanced Skeleton, but since I was so used to using the component editor, I used a mix of skin weight painting for the majority of them and using the component editor to see why certain vertices weren’t moving right due to having other influences I couldn’t spot and adjusting the values of them there, which ended up being a really useful method compared to just solely using the component editor or solely painting the skin weights.

With the rigs fixed, I updated the idle, howl and jogging animations. Since I know the animations can be assigned to different skeletons in Unreal Engine, it doesn’t necessarily make a difference which rig I used to do the animations since they’re both built the same so the animations shown below all use the Yin rig as this would save time compared to animating two idle animations identical to each other which I did previously.

The updated idle animation is shown below:

I made sure to keep Alec’s feedback in mind by making the neck, tail and ears offset from the rest of the body, and I think it looks much better as a result. Since my wolf rigs can now open and close their mouths, I added in mouth movements to look like the wolf is breathing which adds to the overall animation.

The updated howl animation is shown below:

The mouth opening and closing matches the video reference of the wolf howling from a few weeks ago a lot better than the blendshape did and makes the howl animation look a lot better as a result. I also made sure to keep the lively nature of the original animation before and after the howl since Yin remains relatively still during the howl and after the howl she’s visibly gasping for breath from using a lot of energy, which is something conveyed better from the mouth movements.

The updated jogging animation is shown below:

The fixed rigs resulted in the jogging animation looking a lot better as there were no longer limitations on how far forward the legs are able to move, plus it means the upper front legs move with the bottom front legs which looks more visually appealing and correct and not stiff. It’s subtle, but I also added in a slight hop at the height of the jog when the feet are off the ground which results in the wolf not staying at the same level when jogging as there’s now up and down movement implemented, and it’s probably my favourite wolf animation out of the three because of how it turned out.

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