For this milestone, I was originally supposed to focus on monster designs and animations. I started with our explosive enemy, the Puffboom, by sculpting the body from a combination of spheres and cylinders. I based the design off of Avery's concept art, which had the Puffboom looking both massive and round. I also used some brushes I port to give him more texture, like cracks where the smoke comes out of and folds around his legs.  We also added some thorns in last minute, but I never got to finishing their retopology just because it was reaching a high poly count. 

I got as far as retopologizing and rigging the model before I had to pivot with my work. The rig itself was custom made by me in Blender and used IK constraints to help with the leg and arm movement. But I stopped there because of how much progress the coders were making. Since they managed to get most of the player's controls down, we decided it was best if I finished that for the first milestone.

The robot player was pretty easy to make since they mostly used low-poly shapes. The only thing I retopologized was the chest and the legs. I wanted a smoother shape for the chest, so I sculpted it out to give it more curves. That was just easier for me since I'm not an expert in low-poly modeling. I also sculpted parts of the legs since I wanted them to have a curve as well. 

The hardest part about the robot was realizing the arms were way too long. It was hard to see that while it was in a T-pose, so I had to reposition it to get a better idea of the proportions. I also had trouble deciding how to connect the arms to the shoulder sockets. I originally thought of making his arms hover like a lot of the other tech in the same, but decided against it since that looked kind of cheap. Instead, I connected the arms and used automatic weights for their movement. While that the shoulders don't move very robotically, it looks much better and is hardly noticeable thanks to the game's camera angle.

To make the final robot look more armored, I added plates to his chest and legs using an addon I bought. I also gave the robot a custom rig, mostly because I wanted the legs to move more robotically. The robot's legs were designed more like the gears used for train wheels, so I wanted them to move like that. It just meant I had to disconnect the leg bones and limit their movements using different types of constraints. This rig was a little difficult since I couldn't use IKs for the legs, but I made do.

For the animations, I made a normal walk cycle and a simple idle animation so we would have something to work with. These later got scrapped since we didn't plan on having the player walking around without their gun. While unfortunate, this was a great test for the rig and helped me brush up on my animation techniques.