I created this guy as kind of a raptor-pterosaur hybrid. He doesn't actually fly, but he should look at least somewhat intimidating. For this guy I first sketched a picture to get me a rough idea of what I was going for.
Blender was used for the modeling. The basic process was to start with a cube and keep extracting faces, scaling each end, until I started to get a shape I felt happy with. Next I created a UV skin and painted it with a combination of textures found online and a drawing tablet.
For the picture above I left in the outlines to show how I knew where to "paint" in. As you can see, it mostly consisted of using pre-made textures and some careful blending and paint strokes. Once the model was ready, animations were created (The Animator's Survival Kit was a phenomenal book for helping me to learn animation, even if it is quite old and mostly meant for traditional animation). Finally, with the animations ready, I inserted the model into a blender scene I pre-made for animations, and rendered all the animations to be put into a 2D sprite sheet. I used TexturePacker to combine all the 256x256 renders into a single texture sheet with an accompying JSON file that tells the game where each frame is. I personally like TexturePacker because it does automatic trimming and compression.
It may be hard to see but for some of the animation frames in the sprite sheet, you can see that some of the animations go outside the bounds of the sprite, causing ugly clipping. This is just for the death animation, which I need to fix anyways (it doesn't look that good). In total, this guy has a walk, attack, idle, and death animation (and I may eventually add a casting animation). The end product is the animation you see at the top of the post.
Now that I have a good enemy ready, I can now focus on improving the AI behavior. So far so good!
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