I have added the second character to the game! It’s an elephant NPC who is first appearing at the waterhole that you fly over in the first level.
First, I visualized the variants of the character I want to show up:
Then, I modelled, textured and rigged the elephant in 3D. Short, chubby characters like this guy can be tricky to animate, especially if you use such a small amount of polygons. At some points, you just need to cheat for certain animations by subtly scaling bones, for example.
And here they are, having a great time at the old waterhole:
They even react if you fly close to them with your airplane:
