In our newest developer blog, we’re talking about the process of bringing the digital beavers to life in Alberta Hunting Preserve!
Hello everyone!
Ever wondered what it takes to bring a pixel-perfect beaver to life? I’m Aron, an experienced technical animator on theHunter: Call of the Wild, and I’m here to talk about creating this living chainsaw of Askiy Ridge.
Creating believable movement
The initial step of adding the beaver to the game was building its “digital puppet,” which we call a rig. During its creation, the first two things we had to figure out were how the animal moves in real life and what our animators would need to create the experience we’re aiming for.
When looking at how beavers move, we gathered information from a plethora of wildlife videos, as well as the anatomical skeleton of the animal, to determine where we put the joints for the beaver’s digital skeleton. Contrary to what you might think, an animation skeleton does not follow the anatomical skeleton precisely, since we need to take a lot more into consideration.
How does the neck bend? How far up or down does the spine go? How do we make the stomach not collapse in on itself? How in-depth do we want to go with the face? We look into these and many more factors to understand how the skeleton itself should be built.
After the skeleton is done, the fun part begins; the controllers! These are essentially the animator’s toolkit, and have a bunch of quality-of-life features added on top to make animation a lot less tedious.
For example, imagine you want the beaver’s feet to follow the head or stretch its body to be 3 meters long. We work very closely with the animators to ensure their needs and wants are met so they are able to create movements that look as believable as possible.
You can even turn the entire animal into some weird-looking ouroboros creature. Anything is possible, we’re only limited by the imagination of our technical animators. Almost got a perfect circle here, but not without some sacrifices.
Keeping the fluff just right
Even though our beaver isn’t real, we want it to look and move as realistically as possible! Since we don’t have real muscles and skin, we used bones instead to simulate how muscles would actually behave. In 3D, a “bone” is like a control point that influences a specific area on the model. So, when the animators posed the beaver, these bones deformed the digital skin in a believable way.
With bones in place, we were also able to introduce a few small automatic systems that expand and contract areas of the model when the animators stretch and squish the beaver.
Take the beaver’s neck, for instance. When an animator bends its head, we want the neck to compress naturally without losing its volume. So, we used a calculation that measures the distance between the head and base of the neck to automatically adjust the volume of the neck fluff. Then the animators could tweak it further to perfection!

(Don’t mind me, just vibing here)
The Great Fall – from trashcans to trees
You can’t have a beaver without chewing up some trees, right? When we set out to create the perfect beaver, making it able to fell trees was a top priority. Luckily, we didn’t have to start from scratch! We already had another animal in the game that could interact with objects around the world: the raccoon. Through heavily modifying the raccoon’s trashcan, the team managed to adapt the technology so that we now have trees that can be chewed on a few times before falling to the ground.
We actually managed to get this prototype working in just one chaotic afternoon, with half the team needing to catch a train later that day. There was a lot of sending files back and forth to see if changes and assets worked on our individual computers. In my haste, I might have created a hilariously unoptimized system that switched out several full-sized trees each time the beaver interacted with one. But don’t worry, everything is working like it should now!
I hope you enjoyed this small sneak peek into a technical animator’s work and when you spot your first beaver in Askiy Ridge, remember the tech magic that made it possible.
Good luck and beware of falling trees!
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Experience the beaver for yourself on June 17th: