Pack Hunter - Animation, Concept, 3D

Overview of the Pack Hunter enemy. It was meant to be a fast moving, challenging enemy outside of the Rig, but much easier once you were in your mech. The rear legs were inverted, and the face made into a blossom of teeth to make sure it didn't look like an earthly being. The Silhouette was designed to read as immediately dangerous, and it was the most mammalian of all the Akrid on LP3. We pitched this design to Capcom, and they really liked the idea of it, they just wanted to make sure the glowing orange vital points were easy to read. We parameterized the glow to have it be able to flare up, which helped for both distance reads (we could scale it from further away to make it more obvious) and for animation purposes (flaring when it got angry)
In hindsight the only thing I would change about it would be the tentacle targets. They were meant to cause the fast moving Pack Hunter to trip when you shot them, but in gameplay the creature moved so quickly no one ever shot them and aimed for center of mass (ie it's large orange face when running at you). If I could change the tentacle targets, I'd make them much larger targets and have them snap targets during certain movement phases. Overall I was really happy with the creature design and execution though. Even the artists at Blur loved them, providing us with the extra animation provided at the end of this study as proof of concept before putting it in the high res cinematic. It feels great when you have a creature that works in concept, high res, and in-game in Unreal!