Making of Tsuchinoko

Tsuchinoko is the second cryptid I added to CryptidCam. His design is pretty simple, so it didn't take a lot of sketch iteration to feel like I had it. There's a little more Pokemon inspiration here, since I like the kind of dopey closed eye look they give to Dunsparce, and I wanted my Tsuchinoko to have a bit of a lazy vibe as well.

He does win the award for silliest T pose in my game though:

Modeling Tsuchi was really straightforward. He's another pretty resource light model, coming in at 664 tris total. Less than the Jackalope by almost half, but still not the lowest poly model in the game. Any guesses who that honor goes to?

I remember the real struggle with Tsuchinoko came when it was time to animate him. There are probably better ways to animate snake movement so the bones programmatically follow a sine wave or something, but I didn't know how to do that or even how to find out at the time, so I animated his slither manually. It took a lot of iteration to get it to look natural.

He also has a couple disjointed bones for controlling his tongue, which I think is pretty funny. He doesn't have a real working mouth, the tongue just kind of retracts into his head when I don't want to show it.

It's also been funny seeing the various ways people react to Tsuchinoko. He's a bit of a meme in some circles, but broadly I think he's not very well known in the Western world. Most people I talk to about my game know Bigfoot and Nessie when I give those as examples, but mentioning Tsuchinoko almost invariably gets either a confused reaction followed by struggling to repeat the name back, or instant recognition with a "Tsuchinoko Real". That said, a recent Japanese post about CryptidCam mentioned Tsuchinoko and Nessie as examples of well known characters and the Flatwoods Monster as a more niche one. In my experience people in North America are much more likely to know the Flatwoods Monster than Tsuchinoko, so it's interesting to me how cultural and subjective these things are.