After the successful releases of our prefab model libraries Complete Characters and Complete Soldiers, we have decided to create a library of animals that is perfectly suited to add rich life to virtual environments. Since its release in November 2008 individual animals or a bundle of all 30 animals can be purchased from our website www.rocketbox-libraries.com

One of our main goals was to make the animals very usable and valuable for our customers. A market analysis that we did in advance made us realize that most of the prefab animal models available on the market were neither rigged nor animated. But static animals are quite useless in 3d environments and animated scenes, unless the buyer takes care of rigging and animating them himself – however this demands very special knowledge and consumes a lot of development time.

Therefore we rigged all animals properly, even if it was quite an extensive task getting all bone deformations right (as opposed to human characters, every animal’s body and bone skeleton behaves very differently and requires different solutions).

We also decided to add at three or more of the most typical animations for every type of animal. This way our customers would not have to invest additional work if they want to bring the animals alive in their 3D engine or visualization. We added moves like idle animations or walk/run loops for example.

During the preproduction for this project we recorded tons of video footage to have the best possible source material for getting the proportions right, analyze how the bone skeletons work for good skinning and make the animations look as realistic as possible. We created the moves with traditional keyframe animation techniques, which resulted in highly optimized animation clips which are easy to modify and edit if required.

A very useful resource for making the library as convincing as possible were photo shootings that we did of different animals to recreate them in 3D. Using these high resolution photo references as a source for texturing the models made it possible to achieve the realistic look of the animals.

Naturally many animals need the visualization of fur or feathers to look as realistic as possible. However we did not want to make our customers depend on hair plug-ins or special shaders. And as with all our other libraries they had to be working in realtime engines, too.

So we decided to use additional planes with opacity maps in the alpha channel and developed methods to conceal seams between the planes and the main mesh by manipulating the vertex normals and projecting parts of the textures.

To optimize the usage of the animated models in realtime environment even more, we have added Level-Of-Detail meshes and reduced the number of used bones in the lower LODs of course.