The animation created for the monsters is key-frame animation native to Maya. Motionbuilder was not used because of warping geometry upon importing meshes from Maya and the unconventional skeleton rigs being unrecognizable to the program. In order to save time and move onto the rendering as fast as possible key-frame animation of joints within the Maya scene was used. This means that that animation is not baked into the skeleton and is bound to the Maya Timeslider.
Monster No.1
This one was easier to animate as his rig is the simplest of the three and the only trick to him was matching the time between his resting and moving times against his tongue's movements.
Monster No.2
This wolf-like creature was the most difficult to animate as the movements of his legs aren't supposed to be in sync which is tricky to make look natural. It was only during animating it that I realized how inflexible his skeleton is as his legs were modeled much shorter than those of a normal canine. This prevented him from bending his paws fully backwards and forwards nor lifting them high enough from the ground.
Monster No.3
This fish monster was the easiest to animate because he has only two legs and is moving in a single direction. In hindsight, this one should've been left as a group of separate parts instead of a combined mesh as that would've allowed me to apply a rotation animation onto the wheels. All of the monsters were converted into a combined mesh for an easier transfer between scenes and so that all their parts would not get detached for one reason or another. However, this approach most definitely backfired with this model.
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