Posted March 09, 2026 by woofleboofle
The results were great, as I wanted to create a more chunky style creature with large floppy ears.
The only question left was: "is this character suitable for my tourist attraction?"
And the answer: Okay probably not, but look at him!
Rigging the character (adding bones)
Now that I had made my Catamoid, I needed to rig it up in order to animate it, and this required adding bones. However, as I had never used blender before, this task actually took quite a long time!
I did make use of the mirror function in order to help speed up the process as my character was horizontally symmetrical.
Animating the character
For this section we were required to make 3 basic animations: Idle, Walk and Wave (Although I decided to go for the dance option). I found this to be a somewhat similar process to what we did in KIT109 when creating 2D animations.
The layout does have differences in Blender, but basically we had to record while we moved the character into different poses by adjusting the bone placement.
Weight Painting
One area which took me a long time to figure out was weight painting! When I moved the ears, or legs or arms, sometimes it would completely distort the character.
Eventually, I was able to learn about how to resolve this by looking at how different meshes were connected to other meshes and arranged with weighting. For example, for the ears, I didn't want any connection to the head when they moved, so i completely removed the weight connection to the head altogether!
Adding and controlling my character in Unity
Firstly, I imported my Catamoid blender model into Unity. I then created a basic script to control them by following the tutorial and using the new Unity input system (which I am previously familiar with from KIT109).
This allowed me to not only use the keyboard to move the character around, but I could also control them with a gamepad smoothly.
Of course, there were also the usual additions in the scene such as rigid bodies, colliders etc. in order to make the character interact with the environment correctly.
That's it for this devlog!