A closer look at the owl
There are two different types of owls in the game at the moment. A normal owl (light color) and an ultra owl (dark color) just so that you're not confused by seeing both randomly in this post.
Let's start with referencesI used these references (as well as a few others from the innernets) to make sure that I got basic proportions, eyes, feather growth direction and that certain special owl quality right.
ModelingWhen modeling I didn't need to give him actual eye's that could rotate because he would be so small on the screen the player wouldn't notice, so I just painted them on.
I tried to keep him as low poly as possible while still giving him enough geometry to smoothly bend and flex like Gumby.
I also made sure to paint some thin rectangular feather strips out in the alpha so that I didn't just rely completely upon the geo or else it would have looked too plain.
UVsI didn't use the same UVs for the eyes because I wanted slight eye variation kind of like a dog with an eye patch color.
I wanted the feathers to have some kind of layered color gradation down his body so I made them change slightly in hue from left to right and value from top to bottom as seen in the "Feather Layers" of the UVs laid over the texture.
I also like how his actual body is shaped like Mr. Peanut.
Here are the two owl type textures side by side as well as the alpha mask that they are both using.
Rigging
I made sure to blend the skin weights a lot so that when animating him he would seem very squishy squashy.
I only had one extra bone protruding from his neck that I used to animate his thick neck feathers secondary bounce animation. Through bouncing it up and down as well as rotating it to give them a look of random rustling. It was a simple fix that did the job well enough.
I needed enough bones to make the wings bend smoothly. Gave the tail two bones instead of one so that it could widen & narrow instead of only rotate. Also added that extra bone for the neck feathers but I tried to keep the bone count as low as possible considering he's only going to be about an inch in size on most peoples screens.
In-game useThough they are rare, you can stumble across owls anywhere in the game. You never know where they might be.
Once you have captured and equipped a pet owl in the game you can just pull up a placement icon and summon him where ever you click it while in or out of battle.
The owls special ability is every now and then he will create a cloning field around him that when touched by you it will create a clone of yourself that will attract all enemy agro for a few moments allowing you to get free hits in.
Because of the relatively simple way that the owl was used in the game I really only needed to create 2 different looping animations for him; standing, and flying.
Thank you Capntastic & ProgramGamer for your interest! Not sure how many others are, but there you go
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