Animating a Dragon ~ part three ~ animating a bat-like dragon flight cycle.

 Animating a flight cycle

This week, I'm starting the animation of the dragon. Relating to the last post, this will be a bat-like flight cycle.

First, I'll animate the wings, getting them into key poses and then in-betweens. Afterwards I will then animate the head, body and finally tail. The reason for animating it in this order is that all of the motion that the dragon is doing is in the wings, everything else is to support and to power that movement.

Here you can see I animated one wing and then the other, I am quite proud of this wing movement as it feels powerful and well timed, the curling inwards almost grabbing at the air adds a sense of animalistic and feral behaviour.

Here you can see I have animated the head movement as well as the legs, the head movement feels a bit awkward.  

Here I have worked on the head movement more, this makes it more in time with the wings, as well as add momentum to the movement.

Here I have worked on the tail movement, I had difficulty getting the tail movement to work well, and I'm still not completely happy with this movement, however I do feel it makes the movement seem more feral which is something that works quite nicely with a dragon, as well as being something you don't often see with dragon animations.

Now that the tail movement is done, I added additional movement to the torso and shoulders, finishing the animation. I feel that this flying animation, while not entirely bat like, is definitely one that feels natural and that I am proud of.

One thing I tried here was using playblasts instead of gifs, which work well for see a rough render of the animation, however due to not being able to loop, has it's drawbacks, in future WIP posts, I will try to include more of a mix.