This game project is a series of firsts. While I had some ChatGPT support for my first shader, there was no AI involved in this latest endeavor. Also, this was probably the first ever bug I created deliberately and with the intention to keep it in the game!

In Beneath The Order, mining plays an important role. Gathering Vitae is the Subsumed’s designation, and it’s the Vitae from the mines that keeps the Aegis running. To make the mines a little less boring, I wanted to have some critters that crawl through the dark tunnels. Luckily the Synty assets had me covered once again! There’s this cute little bug in the Sci-Fi Worlds art pack:

Since they provide alternative materials in all packs, there was even a bright green colored back which fit (nearly) perfectly to the (bright yellow) Vitae blobs in the mine.

But there was a different issue: the model wasn’t rigged, let alone animated. So in order to bring this critter to life, I had to lay my hands on it, stuff it with a rig/armature, weigh the vertices accordingly, and create an animation.

The rigging part was actually easier than I thought. Often, a well made tutorial helps a lot, and I found this one which I wholeheartedly recommend. Well narrated, straight to the point, no fluff. I had the skeleton set up in no time and the auto-weighting worked perfectly.

With the rig in place, the critter looked like this in Blender:

The next step was to animate this thing and I deliberated whether I should use UMotion Editor which I had installed as a Unity plugin or animate it straight in Blender. Since I already had some success in Blender, I continued there.

I pulled out the animation view from the bottom, recorded the initial stance as a keyframe, and then continued to move the legs partially every few frames. It took me a couple of attempts to find a pattern that didn’t seem completely unnatural; but mind you, I’m looking at this with the eyes of a programmer, I’ve never animated a single leg before. Once I had a walk cycle working, I moved the rear body part a bit, too, to ensure the rest of the body didn’t look too static.

(I’ve opened the dopesheet for the recording to make things a bit clearer, but while creating keyframes, I was in the simpler timeline view.)

In hindsight I was sad that I hadn’t rigged the proboscises (or whatever these mouth parts are), too, but I won’t touch it again any time soon.

There was just one thing missing: a fitting sound effect. I didn’t find anything in my assets that I liked, so I went to freesound.org and I found what I was looking for!

Here’s how it turned out in-game. Turn up your volume to “enjoy” this fully!

Here’s the audio file I used, created by jhumbucker, CC0: freesound.org. According to the description, they just scraped wire brushes against various surfaces. I think it’s a perfect fit!