Hi there!
My name is Eugene and I am a character animator at Whale Rock Games.
My main duty here is animating fauna and flora for our upcoming project We Are The Dwarves!
I am going to tell you about difficulties and challenges I face here on the project and how I deal with them.
Introducing The Swamp Jumper!
This fellow turned out to be a real pain in the neck when it came to animating him.
At first glance he looked quite simple. One leg, no arms, body and head. Nothing else. But the main problem was that you just can’t find a reference for him in real nature. There are NO active mobile animals (especially predators!) with only ONE leg at our planet.
As a result we had to invent all his movements from scratch.
We decided to refer to animals that prefer jumping instead of classical walking – like cangaroo, jerboa, sparrow etc. They gave us overall impression about the way our Jumper should walk and run.
How could creature like that attack? – it was another important question.
After long considerations we decided to borrow King Cobra’s fighting style for our guy 
Animating and merging all this stuff together was quite a difficult challenge, but also very exciting!It is not trivial task for animator - to interbreed a king cobra, a jerboa, a cangaroo, a sparrow and a sack-race champion %)
Run like a jerboa, attack like a cobra!
Okay, after we clarified the nature of Jumper’s movement more or less, I could start building his skeleton.
The main idea Animator must always keep in mind - Never overload the skeleton! Use proper number of bones that are necessary to make your character look vivid and natural.
Crowd of characters, each having a lot of bones, can decrease performance of game engine. So the less bones you put into skeleton - the better.
Spine.
Animator always has to decrease the number of bones to minimum.
For example, human spine has 33-34 vertebrae.
Most of in-game creatures have only 4-5 of them. It is quite enough for bending body in the way you want.
Luckily, spine of most of mammals consists of 5 regions, called the cervical spine, thoracic spine, lumbar spine, sacrum and coccyx.
Feathers on the head.
I divided feathers into logical groups and assigned only one bone per group. It was just enough to animate them without overloading the skeleton.
5 double bones for 14 feathers - not bad. I could decrease the number of bones even more, but head plumage is a very prominent part of Jumper’s image, it indicates his mood, so feathers must have enough bones to be animated intensively.
Neck.
We wanted our Jumper to have an extendable neck. Squash&Stretch animation for neck bones could be the solution. Unfortunately, due to certain reasons we couldn’t use Squash&Stretch for our bones, so I decided to build complex neck consisiting of several elements that could fold and unfold just like a foldable ruler. (Remember bones that I saved with feathers? Now they came in handy)
Now our Jumper can catch flying bugs easily without even leaving the couch
By the way, believe it or not, but a giraffe has as many neck vertebrae as a mouse and a whale, and most of other mammals - seven.
Let’s add a couple of bones in Jumper’s chest for heavy breathing when he is truly excited!
Jumper’s leg.
At first I wanted him to have ‘bird’s leg’.
But this variant was giving unnecessary naughty twists in the process of animating, because the leg of this creature is actually the continious part of the body.
So I decided to make a ‘human leg’ and turn it backwards with the knee directed back.
Note, that birds knees do NOT actually bend backwards as many people believe. Birds legs have generally the same structure as legs of a human and all the other vertebrate animals.
Jaws.
I failed to save much bones on Jumper’s mouth. Our handsome dude has a set of nine jaw-mandibles forming his mouth.
So let’s assign 5 bones to 9 mandibles - just enough for comfortable chewing, roaring, biting and yawning
Also our good-looker possesses seven eyes around his mouth. It would be nice to assign every eyeball an individual bone. It is said that The eyes are the mirror of the soul, so eyes are the last thing to save bones on them.
So Mr Jumper teaches an animator a strict lesson: Sometimes it is much easier to animate a monster with hundred of legs, dozen arms and a bunch of tentacles, than work with ‘simple’ armless dude on one single leg.
Of course we will provide our Jumper with all kinds of various animations so he could enjoy an interesting and diverse life at his sweet Swamps.
But beware of him! Jumpers are greedy predators and always ready to have bloody fun with lost lonely stranger…
See You in the Swamps!
