Dog

I wanted to try out rigging in Blender real quick, so I made a quick model of a Keith Haring dog and rigged it. In the end this little project took a bit longer, since it is never as easy as one would like. Besides modelling and rigging I made some simple VFX, SFX and a background tune, and put everything into a small sample scene in Unity. When the dog barks at the magical torus, all the colours swap :)

The modelling was quite straightforward, the rigging was a bit rough though. My first mistake was building my own armature instead of adjusting a finished one. The second was only creating a deform rig. I thought I wouldn’t need a control rig for simple animations. True, I did not need it, but it would have been more convenient and faster^^

I created three animations: idle, walk and bark. I briefly read up on the 12 principles of animation and tried to get some anticipation, squishing and follow through in there.

The Keith Haring style has bold lines, so I built a simple inverse hull outline in Unity. My model’s sharp edges left visible gaps, so I let Unity calculate new normals with a larger smoothing angle. The extra normals messed up the shading, so I used an unlit material plus an invisible material that still casts a shadow.

The VFX are simple motion lines made in Unity’s ShaderGraph, triggered by animation events.

For the audio I used FL Studio and the free BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover instruments. Just like in Peter and the Wolf, the bark is played by horns; the steps are violin plucks. For the background loop I ended up with a curious tune of marimba, percussion and clarinet. I like it, though I don’t think it quite fits the demo’s aesthetic.

I built the scene with a fence, some green, a sun and the magical torus using ProBuilder. It felt empty, so I added grass: instead of going down the compute shader rabbit hole, I modelled a simple grass mesh in Blender and brushed it onto Unity’s terrain, which turns out to use GPU instancing too.

For the bark’s colour swap, inspired by Ape Out, I used a Color Lookup post-processing effect with LUT textures made in Krita. The result was a bit less controlled than swapping materials, but it was nice to try out.