Revamping Viking animations for Reborn

We wanted to give some shine to the various people working on Trolls vs Vikings Reborn. We have already told you a bit about the music (Aleksandar), and today about the new animations we put into the game. We made all new Vikings models for Reborn, and naturally then made all new Vikings animations to give them more oomph and “weight”.

For this we knew of no better animator than Aslak Helgensen, from Rain Games, who we hired as a freelancer on Trolls Reborn. Last year Aslak was incredibly enough nominated for the Annie Awards for his animation work on Teslagrad 2. This is the most prestigious award to recognizing excellence in animation across film, television, and video games, so we know Aslak is a top-shelf animator. The new animation then comes on top of the original animation by Voja Dimitrijevic, which we also feel is excellent. Hopefully these two top notch animators make you feel like the Trolls and Vikings come alive within the game.

And do check out the Rain game titles that Aslak is so involved in, including Teslagrad 1 and 2, they are great!

We then got some words from Aslak, so we leave the rest up to him, with some clips from his work:

I got a chance to work on the Trolls vs Viking: Reborn!

The Megapop game series is well known here in Norway so I was excited to get to animate the Viking character. The team is also a super friendly bunch that I enjoyed working with.

The original games chunky and stompy charm is appealing, and the new designs that were made for the re-release add some nice opportunities for expressive animation. I rummaged a bit for how to make something that feels like the original and is still a clear upgrade. I looked at what the limitations of the original were: Only the necessary moving parts plus little in the way of secondary motion, and concluded that adding overlapping action to more of the costume would be a likely path to success.

My main animation tool for a long time has been Blender so I rigged and animated the character with that tool. It has gotten better support for doing 2D characters, but could use some improvements for Unity support for those features! I added extra controls for such things as the beard and cape and got to work.

Having access to the original animations made timing easy, but to make actions like attacks more impactful, I added more variation to the easing and bouncy movements to the clothes and beard. I also took the opportunity to make the death and rise from death animations overly dramatic and silly. I think most animators enjoy some good slapstick and I’m no exception.

The final result feels like a solid upgrade to me, but also fits right in with the original ensemble of characters. I also had a lot of fun working with this grumpy guy, and I hope you all have fun giving him a good thwacking!

Aslak Helgensen