3D Mimic - Stylized Rigged & Animated Treasure Chest Monster with PBR

A treasure chest that bites. The Mimic is the loot-room ambush for dungeon crawlers, roguelikes, ARPGs and turn-based RPGs: it waits among the furniture as an ordinary oak and iron chest, then rears up on four clawed legs with its lid thrown back over a mouthful of fangs. Use it as a trap, a jump scare or a mini-boss guarding the gold. Drag the prefab into a scene and press Play: with no setup it starts on its Closed loop, and the Animator Controller already holds all seven clips as states, ready for the transition that springs the trap.

It passes for furniture. Shut, it is a barrel-top oak chest 0.94 m across and 0.80 m tall, bound with two iron bands, five wall straps and two lid straps, with a lock plate, two hinges and eight gold coins on the lid's front lip. Every strap, hinge and coin is modelled geometry, not paint. In Closed and Idle the legs stay tucked out of sight inside the box, so the disguise holds from every angle. The tells are there for players who look: a keyhole of red flesh, and a lid that cracks open on its own.

Seven clips that play the whole ambush. Closed (2 s, looping) is the chest at rest. Idle (3 s, seamless loop) is still a chest, but alive: the lid and jaw crack open twice, showing a glowing seam of red gum, and the coins ride up with the lid. Open (1.33 s) is the reveal: a gather, then the four legs swing out sideways from inside the box and lift the chest 0.21 m off the floor as the lid is thrown back just past vertical. Lunge (1.07 s) rocks back, then pounces 0.30 m forward, banking in the air, and settles back onto its start mark, so it plays in place. Bite (1.0 s) gapes wider, slams the lid down onto the teeth and holds the clamp. Hit (0.87 s) knocks it back 6 cm with the lid clapping part way shut and springing open again. Die (1.8 s) buckles the legs flat and drops the chest to the floor, keeled on one edge with its tongue lolling. Lunge, Hit, Bite and Die all start on one shared combat stance, and Lunge, Hit and Bite return to it (only the tongue tip is still settling), so they chain cleanly with a short crossfade. Open is one-way: once sprung, it stays a monster.

A mouth made for close-ups. Once the lid is up, it shows 26 tapered fangs in two interleaved rows (14 on the lower gum, 12 on the palate), a four-bone tongue and an emissive red gullet. Four blend shapes on LOD0 are there for script control: no clip keys them, so a weight set from script, in Update or LateUpdate, holds on top of any clip. Snarl draws the palate up to 10 mm back off the upper fangs and flexes the lower gum, Gulp contracts the throat by 12% and drops it 15 mm, TongueFat swells the tongue about 28% wider and thicker, and Breathe bulges the lid 14 mm so even a closed chest can give itself away. Use them for barks, taunts and cutscene beats.

A rig built for a chest. The custom 17-bone rig ships Generic: Root and Body, a hinged Lid, a Jaw, a four-bone tongue and four two-bone legs. Root never rotates in any clip, so root motion and ground snapping stay simple. The Bait bone sits on the coin heap at the lid's front lip and is parented to the Lid, so a loot prop, a glint or a particle effect hung there rides the lid open with the gold.

Textures that carry their own shading. Four 2048x2048 maps: a base colour with the wood grain, lighting, occlusion and edge highlights baked in, so the chest keeps its shading even under flat lighting; a tangent-space normal map carrying the plank grain; a packed metallic/smoothness map; and an emission map that makes the gullet glow. One material means one draw call per LOD, and three LODs ship in the FBX.

Clean quads, built to animate. LOD0 is one skinned mesh of 6,944 quads with no triangles or n-gons, built from 56 closed parts: the oak box, rim and throat are one continuous solid, and the lid, iron, gums, fangs, tongue, coins and legs are quad meshes of their own. On LOD0 and LOD1 no vertex carries more than five edges, and the few five-edge poles sit where each leg branches into its foot and claws. One UV channel, no overlapping islands, and even texel density across the outside of the chest.

Want the whole horde? The Mimic is one of ten monsters in the Dungeon Horde pack: the Goblin Scout, Orc Warlord, Skeleton Knight, Troll, Lich, Gargoyle, Dragon Whelp, Treant, Slime and Mimic. Every one has 2K stylized PBR textures, three LODs, blend shapes and a prefab with its Animator Controller, and the seven bipeds share Unity's humanoid bone names (Humanoid-compatible, they ship Generic). $79.99 for all ten, against $159.90 bought one at a time.

What's in the package:
- One FBX: skeleton, three LOD meshes, blend shapes and all animation takes
- Four 2048x2048 PNG textures: base colour, normal, metallic/smoothness, emission
- An Animator Controller with one state per clip, the resting clip as the default state
- A prefab of the model, LODGroup included and the controller already assigned, ready to drag into a scene
- A demo scene: the model, a key light and a camera already framed on it, playing on open
- A README covering import, the LODs, the blend shapes, the sockets and the clip list
Assets import to Assets/Backrock/DungeonHorde//.

Why it drops straight into a scene:
- 1 Unity unit = 1 metre. Imports at Scale Factor 1, upright, at rotation (0,0,0), facing +Z. No rescaling, no rotation fix, no empty parent object.
- Three LODs that Unity wires up on import: the meshes carry the _LOD0/1/2 names, so the LODGroup is built for you and the prefab inherits it.
- Generic rig with an Animator-ready avatar, so every clip plays exactly as authored, extra bones included.
- Blend shapes on LOD0, set from the SkinnedMeshRenderer like any other; a weight set from LateUpdate holds while any clip plays.
- Every looping clip is genuinely seamless: the first and last frame hold identical poses, verified at build time rather than eyeballed.
- One material, one draw call per LOD.

Key Features:
- Ambush-ready: Closed is the default state, a plain 0.94 x 0.80 x 0.64 m oak and iron chest with the legs hidden inside
- Seven clips at 30 fps: Closed and Idle (seamless loops), Open, Lunge, Hit, Die and Bite (one-shot)
- A full mouth: 26 fangs in two rows, a four-bone tongue and an emissive gullet
- Four blend shapes on LOD0 for script control: Snarl, Gulp, TongueFat and Breathe
- Custom 17-bone Generic rig with a hinged lid, a jaw and four two-bone legs, plus a Bait socket on the coin heap
- Stylized PBR: four 2048x2048 maps (base colour, normal, metallic/smoothness, emission) for one material
- Three LODs, 13,888 / 3,472 / 1,736 triangles, with the LODGroup built on import
- All-quad LOD0 and LOD1, one skinned mesh per LOD built from closed parts; five-edge poles only where the legs branch into feet
- Prefab with the controller assigned, a demo scene and a README; 1 unit = 1 m, imports upright at Scale Factor 1