Robot Enemy Rigging and Animation

Having done robot characters in the past the rigging and skin weights process was very straight forward for me. I started off by getting the model setup by rotating all the arms down into a straight pose which would make it easier for me to rig.

For the rig I created a root joint underneath the model to help simulate flying for when I done the idle and attacking animations, I also didn’t include extra joints onto the claw hands and had them end at the wrists to simplify it and allow them to be rotated around with no complications. I made sure all the joints where orientated correctly before painting the skin weight.

I flooded the skin weights on all the different parts to the correct joints and ensured that there was no stretching or unnecessary movement of the model when moving the joints.

For the animations I created an idle animation and a attacking animation. For both animations I exaggerated the movement slightly because of how far zoomed out the camera was when playing through the levels I wanted the player to easily be able to distinguish the difference between a patrolling enemy and when an enemy is going into attack mode. The idle animation I had the robot moving ever so slightly up and down with minor movement in the arms and shoulders.

For the attacking animation I had the robot tilt forward and go into a dash whilst rotating his hands inwards into a new pose to make it more obvious to the player. I also synced it with the up and down movement of the idle animation.

Idle Animation

Attack Mode Animation