Eltanin Casciani
Community Manager
Hayo Zookeepers!
We know you're all very excited for the Planet Zoo: Twilight Pack coming out soon! Before that though we're back with another developer journal. Let's welcome some of our team to talk to us about the special new feature coming to the Twilight Pack: the Bat Exhibits! Let's dive right in and learn more about this delightful addition in more detail.
Hayo! We're thrilled to have you take part in this dev journal. Can you introduce yourself a little bit for everyone tuning in?
Victor: Hi, my name is Victor and I'm a Senior Animator. My job consists in researching animals online and sometimes in person at the zoo to see how they move and then translating that to our models so they move and are believable.
Kyron: Hello! I’m Kyron and I am a Senior Rigger on Planet Zoo! I’ve been with Frontier for just over 3 years and have been working on Planet Zoo since its release.
Arron: Hi, my name is Arron! I am a Graduate Gameplay Programmer on Planet Zoo and joined the team about a year ago.
Update 1.11 will include a new special feature, a Walkthrough Exhibit, can you tell us more about them?
Victor: Absolutely. Ever since I visited my first Bat walkthrough exhibit at Shepreth Wildlife Park, I was amazed. The fact the animals fly in such close proximity to you is something truly special. Also, it's a type of exhibit that can give you a feeling of trepidation when you think bats might collide with you, only to change their path at the last moment. Hence, I think it fits very well the theme for our Twilight Pack, as there are other seasonally spooky elements to it. I'm very glad we were able to include this as a special feature for this Pack, as it's a type of exhibit very dear to my heart.
Kyron: The Walkthrough Exhibit is going to be a new feature coming specially to the Twilight pack that’s going to give everyone's zoos a new way to house one of our amazing new animals, the Egyptian Fruit Bat. With this exhibit, not only are we able to interact with and view these animals in newer ways, our guests can too! With our walkthrough exhibits the guests will be able to experience the bats up close and really see all of the action. These exhibits are larger than our normal exhibits, they require more space for us to realistically portray their movements. We wanted to do this whilst also adding the possibility for guests to walk through the experience, and for the bats to have good visibility whilst in these exhibits as we definitely don’t want to miss anything!
Arron: The Walkthrough Exhibit is a unique new feature in the Twilight Pack where guests are able to, as the name describes, walk through it! It can be decorated with all of the existing scenery pieces, along with various new features like enabling custom walls and ceilings which are specific to this Exhibit. As for functionality, it will be mechanically similar to the existing exhibits, where you can toggle the enrichments and add lots of new bats to it. I personally quite like bats so I’m sure the guests will love admiring them in their new home.
Can you tell us more about the Egyptian Fruit Bat Exhibit in the Twilight Pack?
Victor: We wanted to capture the cuteness of bats. It's an animal that has had some bad press, but we believe they're very sweet and characterful. We tried to capture that in things like the hanging down cycle when they yawn very cutely. Their flight animation was very challenging as these guys are awesome at flight, and fly in a very unique way, so we had to do some work to ensure we captured the uniqueness of the species. One thing that mesmerized us was seeing a slow-motion capture of the flipping motion they do to get attached to the ceiling in mid-air. Just incredible.
With any new feature, I'm sure there is a level of research needed to make these work. What research did you do beforehand?
Kyron: For rigging, we do a great amount of research into looking at the animal's behaviours, key poses, skeletons, and even how their skin moves. This is so we can highlight any extreme movements, unique features, and just the general ways their bodies behave, all of which we take into account and aim to give our animators the ability to reproduce these mannerisms with our rigs. This was really key for our bats as they have such interesting movements and body poses from how their wings move when they’re flying, to their specific pose for when they’re sleeping, and we really wanted to capture all of this.
Victor: For animation, it took a good deal of research to bring the Egyptian Fruit Bat to life, given their flight dynamics are quite unique. We took a look at loads of footage from multiple sources until we were able to piece together a movement map that covered all the interactions we needed to implement such as eating, sleeping, water skimming, landing, and taking off. As you can imagine, having an airborne animal is completely different from having a land one. In this regard, Bavo, our Exhibit Modeller, did an amazing job mapping the environment so that we could create flight paths that were interesting and yet feasible without the animals colliding with any element. This back and forward with Bavo helped us to polish the animations and make them work well with all the enrichment items, feeders, etc that he came up with.
After all the research is done, how do you utilise it when creating and making everything work?
Kyron: After we’ve found our key information and references for our Egyptian Fruit Bat’s skeleton, movements, and behaviours, we work very closely with our art and animation teams to decide on a pose for our model. Once we have our model produced by our incredibly talented character art team, we can then use our research and the tools at our disposal to create a realistic skeleton. For our skeleton to move our model we need to do a process we call "skinning" first, where we paint an influence of movement from a bone of our skeleton to a section of our model. This helps us isolate parts of the body to only move when we’re moving a specific bone. Our research on how an animal's skin moves really helps with this so we can look at something like how much movement the bats body has when the wing or a leg moves and then recreate that in our own animals.
Of course, our rigs also need to be able to realistically move the skeleton so we create control setups to move the different areas of our skeleton - kind of like we’re putting strings on our animals, and the animators are the puppeteers! This is something we work very closely with the animation team on as there’s a lot of testing involved to make sure that the animators can work their magic and create their amazing work.
Victor: Once we had the rigged model, we dissected the flying movements and created a few flapping cycles that were suitable for these animals. Then we layered animation on top to create the illusion of randomness in their directional change, attitude, height, etc to make a composite longer loop. We put that loop on a path we designed, in collaboration with our Environment Artist, Bavo. Once this was done, we created the ins and outs of the other different elements, like landing on the feeders, taking off, etc.
Arron: Since I was one of the programmers on this feature, my job was to help bring the work of others into the game and make it function in a natural way. Due to this, the research on how the entire exhibit would fit together was particularly important to me. We wanted to make sure the end product felt like an authentic bat exhibit that you would see in real zoos!
The Egyptian Fruit Bat is quite a unique addition to the exhibit animals, did the process differ when implementing its mechanics?
Kyron: For the bat, we had to approach this animal in a different way than any other previous Exhibit Animals. We spent a lot of time closely working with the animation team to test different iterations of our rigs and to ensure that we were hitting our desired movements and poses. We would also review animations together to voice opinions on where we could improve certain areas like the rig functionality or how the rig was being used.
Victor: Yes, the Egyptian Fruit Bat being a flying creature really forced us to rethink how to approach this. We've explored animating Exhibits on a smaller scale before this, where the animals sometimes swim around or similar things like that, but this time we took that principle and maxed it to 1000. It was technically challenging because we had to have a good deal of back and forwards to get the system working but very rewarding to see it coming together, and worth it for this unique Exhibit inclusion.
How did you bring to life the experience of the walkthrough exhibits and what was the process behind this?
Arron: There were, of course, some differences between the Egyptian Fruit Bats compared to the existing Exhibit Animals. For example, with this Exhibit being walkthrough, we had to be mindful of where the guests would be and how they would view the bats from that location.
We wanted to enhance the current experience of Exhibits so one of the big things we wanted to tackle was the cameras. As this new Exhibit is larger, we felt that allowing you to get more up close and personal with the exhibit animals was essential to making them feel more alive.
What was the most challenging part of creating the Bat Exhibit Feature and how did you overcome them?
Kyron: I think the most challenging part for me was creating a rig setup where we could do the unique poses of the Egyptian Fruit Bat justice; from having their wings outstretched when flying to being tucked away when they’re sleeping, there was a lot of problem-solving and testing different setups, which was interesting and very fun. We just kept pushing the rig and animations further and further as we continued and ended up with a really unique rig for a very unique animal.
Victor: For animation, it was thinking of a way of making this possible. The amount of variation we went for is quite a lot and we needed to make sure it was all doable. We did this on top of our normal amount of work for the other animals, but I think we found a great balance where there’s enough variation to make it look awesome.
Arron: The most challenging part for me was allowing as much customisation as possible in a way that made sense and functioned as intended. We knew we wanted to be able to customise the walls and doors, but as we have not done anything like this before, it required a bit of work to get it just right.
And lastly, what were some of your favourite moments working on this particular exhibit animal and the new Walkthrough exhibit feature?
Victor: As always, it was the research. Going to Shepreth Wildlife Park to see the animals in person and looking at a good deal of footage and documentaries was very educational and fun. The absolute best part though is yet to come, which is seeing the players enjoy having this exhibit in their parks (hopefully as much as we had creating them!).
Kyron: My favourite moment working on this Exhibit was definitely when we first got to see the bats in action in-game. They’re just so unique and different from what we’ve done before and our animators really captured their movements amazingly. Seeing them in the lovely exhibits with all the details and all of it working together has just been great.
Arron: My favourite part has to be seeing how it all has come together bit by bit with the work from everyone on the team, from the initial designs, all the way to the finished product with all the amazing art and animations!
And that's about all we have time for folks! Please join us in thanking Victor, Kyron, and Arron for joining us for this Developer Journal. We hope you enjoyed this insight into some of the various steps that go into adding new features and unique species to Planet Zoo!
It's not too long until the launch of the Planet Zoo: Twilight Pack, which launches on 18th October! We hope you are as excited as we are
Make sure you don't miss it by a second by heading over to Steam and wishlisting now!
We know you're all very excited for the Planet Zoo: Twilight Pack coming out soon! Before that though we're back with another developer journal. Let's welcome some of our team to talk to us about the special new feature coming to the Twilight Pack: the Bat Exhibits! Let's dive right in and learn more about this delightful addition in more detail.
Hayo! We're thrilled to have you take part in this dev journal. Can you introduce yourself a little bit for everyone tuning in?
Victor: Hi, my name is Victor and I'm a Senior Animator. My job consists in researching animals online and sometimes in person at the zoo to see how they move and then translating that to our models so they move and are believable.
Kyron: Hello! I’m Kyron and I am a Senior Rigger on Planet Zoo! I’ve been with Frontier for just over 3 years and have been working on Planet Zoo since its release.
Arron: Hi, my name is Arron! I am a Graduate Gameplay Programmer on Planet Zoo and joined the team about a year ago.
Update 1.11 will include a new special feature, a Walkthrough Exhibit, can you tell us more about them?
Victor: Absolutely. Ever since I visited my first Bat walkthrough exhibit at Shepreth Wildlife Park, I was amazed. The fact the animals fly in such close proximity to you is something truly special. Also, it's a type of exhibit that can give you a feeling of trepidation when you think bats might collide with you, only to change their path at the last moment. Hence, I think it fits very well the theme for our Twilight Pack, as there are other seasonally spooky elements to it. I'm very glad we were able to include this as a special feature for this Pack, as it's a type of exhibit very dear to my heart.
Kyron: The Walkthrough Exhibit is going to be a new feature coming specially to the Twilight pack that’s going to give everyone's zoos a new way to house one of our amazing new animals, the Egyptian Fruit Bat. With this exhibit, not only are we able to interact with and view these animals in newer ways, our guests can too! With our walkthrough exhibits the guests will be able to experience the bats up close and really see all of the action. These exhibits are larger than our normal exhibits, they require more space for us to realistically portray their movements. We wanted to do this whilst also adding the possibility for guests to walk through the experience, and for the bats to have good visibility whilst in these exhibits as we definitely don’t want to miss anything!
Arron: The Walkthrough Exhibit is a unique new feature in the Twilight Pack where guests are able to, as the name describes, walk through it! It can be decorated with all of the existing scenery pieces, along with various new features like enabling custom walls and ceilings which are specific to this Exhibit. As for functionality, it will be mechanically similar to the existing exhibits, where you can toggle the enrichments and add lots of new bats to it. I personally quite like bats so I’m sure the guests will love admiring them in their new home.
Can you tell us more about the Egyptian Fruit Bat Exhibit in the Twilight Pack?
Victor: We wanted to capture the cuteness of bats. It's an animal that has had some bad press, but we believe they're very sweet and characterful. We tried to capture that in things like the hanging down cycle when they yawn very cutely. Their flight animation was very challenging as these guys are awesome at flight, and fly in a very unique way, so we had to do some work to ensure we captured the uniqueness of the species. One thing that mesmerized us was seeing a slow-motion capture of the flipping motion they do to get attached to the ceiling in mid-air. Just incredible.
With any new feature, I'm sure there is a level of research needed to make these work. What research did you do beforehand?
Kyron: For rigging, we do a great amount of research into looking at the animal's behaviours, key poses, skeletons, and even how their skin moves. This is so we can highlight any extreme movements, unique features, and just the general ways their bodies behave, all of which we take into account and aim to give our animators the ability to reproduce these mannerisms with our rigs. This was really key for our bats as they have such interesting movements and body poses from how their wings move when they’re flying, to their specific pose for when they’re sleeping, and we really wanted to capture all of this.
Victor: For animation, it took a good deal of research to bring the Egyptian Fruit Bat to life, given their flight dynamics are quite unique. We took a look at loads of footage from multiple sources until we were able to piece together a movement map that covered all the interactions we needed to implement such as eating, sleeping, water skimming, landing, and taking off. As you can imagine, having an airborne animal is completely different from having a land one. In this regard, Bavo, our Exhibit Modeller, did an amazing job mapping the environment so that we could create flight paths that were interesting and yet feasible without the animals colliding with any element. This back and forward with Bavo helped us to polish the animations and make them work well with all the enrichment items, feeders, etc that he came up with.
After all the research is done, how do you utilise it when creating and making everything work?
Kyron: After we’ve found our key information and references for our Egyptian Fruit Bat’s skeleton, movements, and behaviours, we work very closely with our art and animation teams to decide on a pose for our model. Once we have our model produced by our incredibly talented character art team, we can then use our research and the tools at our disposal to create a realistic skeleton. For our skeleton to move our model we need to do a process we call "skinning" first, where we paint an influence of movement from a bone of our skeleton to a section of our model. This helps us isolate parts of the body to only move when we’re moving a specific bone. Our research on how an animal's skin moves really helps with this so we can look at something like how much movement the bats body has when the wing or a leg moves and then recreate that in our own animals.
Of course, our rigs also need to be able to realistically move the skeleton so we create control setups to move the different areas of our skeleton - kind of like we’re putting strings on our animals, and the animators are the puppeteers! This is something we work very closely with the animation team on as there’s a lot of testing involved to make sure that the animators can work their magic and create their amazing work.
Victor: Once we had the rigged model, we dissected the flying movements and created a few flapping cycles that were suitable for these animals. Then we layered animation on top to create the illusion of randomness in their directional change, attitude, height, etc to make a composite longer loop. We put that loop on a path we designed, in collaboration with our Environment Artist, Bavo. Once this was done, we created the ins and outs of the other different elements, like landing on the feeders, taking off, etc.
Arron: Since I was one of the programmers on this feature, my job was to help bring the work of others into the game and make it function in a natural way. Due to this, the research on how the entire exhibit would fit together was particularly important to me. We wanted to make sure the end product felt like an authentic bat exhibit that you would see in real zoos!
The Egyptian Fruit Bat is quite a unique addition to the exhibit animals, did the process differ when implementing its mechanics?
Kyron: For the bat, we had to approach this animal in a different way than any other previous Exhibit Animals. We spent a lot of time closely working with the animation team to test different iterations of our rigs and to ensure that we were hitting our desired movements and poses. We would also review animations together to voice opinions on where we could improve certain areas like the rig functionality or how the rig was being used.
Victor: Yes, the Egyptian Fruit Bat being a flying creature really forced us to rethink how to approach this. We've explored animating Exhibits on a smaller scale before this, where the animals sometimes swim around or similar things like that, but this time we took that principle and maxed it to 1000. It was technically challenging because we had to have a good deal of back and forwards to get the system working but very rewarding to see it coming together, and worth it for this unique Exhibit inclusion.
How did you bring to life the experience of the walkthrough exhibits and what was the process behind this?
Arron: There were, of course, some differences between the Egyptian Fruit Bats compared to the existing Exhibit Animals. For example, with this Exhibit being walkthrough, we had to be mindful of where the guests would be and how they would view the bats from that location.
We wanted to enhance the current experience of Exhibits so one of the big things we wanted to tackle was the cameras. As this new Exhibit is larger, we felt that allowing you to get more up close and personal with the exhibit animals was essential to making them feel more alive.
What was the most challenging part of creating the Bat Exhibit Feature and how did you overcome them?
Kyron: I think the most challenging part for me was creating a rig setup where we could do the unique poses of the Egyptian Fruit Bat justice; from having their wings outstretched when flying to being tucked away when they’re sleeping, there was a lot of problem-solving and testing different setups, which was interesting and very fun. We just kept pushing the rig and animations further and further as we continued and ended up with a really unique rig for a very unique animal.
Victor: For animation, it was thinking of a way of making this possible. The amount of variation we went for is quite a lot and we needed to make sure it was all doable. We did this on top of our normal amount of work for the other animals, but I think we found a great balance where there’s enough variation to make it look awesome.
Arron: The most challenging part for me was allowing as much customisation as possible in a way that made sense and functioned as intended. We knew we wanted to be able to customise the walls and doors, but as we have not done anything like this before, it required a bit of work to get it just right.
And lastly, what were some of your favourite moments working on this particular exhibit animal and the new Walkthrough exhibit feature?
Victor: As always, it was the research. Going to Shepreth Wildlife Park to see the animals in person and looking at a good deal of footage and documentaries was very educational and fun. The absolute best part though is yet to come, which is seeing the players enjoy having this exhibit in their parks (hopefully as much as we had creating them!).
Kyron: My favourite moment working on this Exhibit was definitely when we first got to see the bats in action in-game. They’re just so unique and different from what we’ve done before and our animators really captured their movements amazingly. Seeing them in the lovely exhibits with all the details and all of it working together has just been great.
Arron: My favourite part has to be seeing how it all has come together bit by bit with the work from everyone on the team, from the initial designs, all the way to the finished product with all the amazing art and animations!
And that's about all we have time for folks! Please join us in thanking Victor, Kyron, and Arron for joining us for this Developer Journal. We hope you enjoyed this insight into some of the various steps that go into adding new features and unique species to Planet Zoo!
It's not too long until the launch of the Planet Zoo: Twilight Pack, which launches on 18th October! We hope you are as excited as we are
Make sure you don't miss it by a second by heading over to Steam and wishlisting now!
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