In true Mortal Kombat fashion, the trees in Corrupted Forest have been burned away and turned into miserable, tortured versions of their more wise and mystical-looking past selves. The goal here was to portray a sense of agony on the skull that pays some tribute to the original living forest trees' animations and I'm very happy with the results! Everything was hand animated using just a handful of joints.
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Animating parts were cut away from non-animating parts of the tree before rigging and animating.
Some supplemental physics-enabled dangly bits and some particle fx were constrained to the mesh to add some secondary motion to the setup.