Age of Empires Online Animations Part 5 Fish Under Siege

Whose going to save those fish?! Oh…wait…those fish are for eating. Carry on. All ships, for the most part, were animated the same way. The idle would be animated, and then attack and movement animations were based on that. Deaths would be a pretty generic version of the ship sinking into the sea. Here’s two ships, and the idle from each.

Click on the images to view the animations. Animations require quicktime to view.

 Fishing Boat Idle 

 Travel Ship Idle 

Siege units, if used right, can really turn the tides of a stalemate for you. If used wrong, they can really turn the tides of a stalemate… for the other guy. These units will lay waste to anything that comes across their path aoe style (that’s area of effect because they have splash damage.)

These units were nice to animate: they gave a break from animating organic characters, which allowed my mind to refresh, and had few animations so I could finish them relatively quickly. Idle, death, attack, movement, with a variation here and there, they were easy and fun. I didn’t animate all of the siege or all of the ships, but here’s a taste of the stuff I did get a chance to animate. Death animations were created with Reactor in 3ds Max from a version of the model that was broken up into several pieces so those pieces could fly about when ran the physics tests and then baked those tests onto the models’ skeletons.

The Ballista shoots giant bolts.

 Idle 1  Idle 2 

 Walk 1  Walk 2 

 Attack 1  Attack 2 

The Catapult hurls rocks. SMASH!

 Idle  Walk 

 Attack 1  Attack 2 

 Death 

The Palintonon siege unit worked a bit differently than the rest. It is the only unit that requires it to “pack” for movement and “unpack” for attacking. It also slings giant rocks…SPLAT!

 Idle Packed  Walk Packed 

 Death Packed  Unpack 

 Idle Unpack  Attack 

 Death  Pack 

Across the ships and siege units, we made sure to keep them on point with the style of the animation used on the human and animal characters.

That’s the end of part 5 of my Age of Empires Online animations post. Thanks for viewing, and I hope you enjoyed the Siege units and the floppy fish aka the not so sexy units. Sorry, about the large gap in time between posts, but be sure to come back for part 6!

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Be sure to check out previous posts in my Age of Empires Online Animations series here: Part 1: Dear John, Part 2: Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh MY, Part 3: Mr Hoppy and the Axeman, and Part 4: Mount Up. If you haven’t, do it. They’re great!