Animating a dragon ~ part ten ~ The Showreel

 Here is my showreel of the animations created over the duration of this project, I hope you enjoy!

Animating a dragon ~ part nine ~ evaluation

With this blog post, I wanted to do an informal evaluation of this project, before putting together a final showreel for the next and final blog post of this project.

When I started out with this project, I hadn't animated anything other than bipedal movements before, let alone flying. However, I wanted to really dig into animal animation with this project, making somewhat of a case study of references. I feel that I have achieved this.

I started off with discussing what kind of animations I would like to create, such as bat like flight cycles:

As well as bird like:

Throughout this project, I have enjoyed researching real life animals for inspiration and referencing. This part of the project was very important, as it has greatly developed my skills in searching for reference as well as being able to better identify good reference material. 

While I am pleased with the work I've produced as well as the quantity, I do wish I dedicated more time to this project, if I had more time with this project, I would've enjoyed creating more ground movement cycles, such as one referencing a bear-like movement. I would've also have liked to create transitional animations so that there are take off and landing animations, which when combined with all of the animations would hopefully creating a unique and sophisticated animation set.


In conclusion, 
I am quite pleased with my work over the duration of this project, I believe it to be of decent quality, but not without plenty of room to improve, such as adding more rotational movement to the torso, for a few of my animations with this dragon rig, the torso has felt quite rigid. The same goes for the tail, I feel like if I had dedicated more time for more animations than I could've really gotten my head around the tail movements, whereas I currently feel that they are somewhat awkward. Going forwards, I hope I be able to make time to play around with this rig some more, as it is an extremely high quality rig as well as quite fun to animate.

Animating a dragon ~ part eight ~ animating a bat-like ground movement cycle

 With this animation, I was taking primary reference from this gif of a bat doing a weird hop thing, I figured it had potential to create a feral movement for a dragon.

First I started with the arm movement and the body movement.

This movement resulted in a sort of funny hop movement with the legs. Something that had to be fixed however.

Having next animated the legs as well as the head movement, the animation was starting to come together. However, the head movement felt too fast, and the tail also needed movement.

After animating the tail and tweaking the head movement, I was left with this, of which I am quite pleased, however it does feel a little bit goofy, perhaps it would be good as a start to a take off or just after a landing. 

Animating a dragon ~ part seven ~ animating a glide

I realised that I had forgotten to do a glide and so I set out to do a glide animation.
However, I soon found myself listening to the How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack and getting really into this animation. However, I think that my hours of work paid off.

I found that due to the wing movement during the glide, videos were necessary as gifs would miss a lot of the small movements that really make up this animation.
As usual, I started with the wings, animating one and then another.
I was using clips from How To Train Your Dragon as reference for the gliding, as the whole film has some amazing shots of this being used.

With both wings having this animation, the glide was really starting to come together. However, it seemed like the movement was far too fast, however I wanted to keep the same frequency of movement, so I opted to make the movement far smaller.

The wing on the left is the old one and the one on the right is the improved movement, I think that it is a real improvement. I also started to animate the head movement here, adding wind effects to some of the horns, however opting to keep the middle spine rigid as while the head spines were able to be animated, the rig did not allow for the spines anywhere else along the dragon to be animated.

With both wings now matching, the animation was really starting to come together.

I then started animating the feet, I decided to add wind movements to the toes as well.

While this tiny detail isn't very important, I felt that it really added to the animation's realism.

Afterwards, I animated slight movement on the tail and the body, leaving me with this.

I really enjoyed creating this glide, however it was quite tedious as almost every joint had lots of minute movements, barely moving at all. Due to how many keyed frames there were, just on the wings, I had to playblast the animation every time I wanted to check what the animation looked like as it would cause Maya's playback to be very laggy.
Overall however, I am very pleased with this animation.

Animating a dragon ~ part six ~ animating bird-like flight cycles

 In this post, I will be detailing over how I am going about animating bird-like dragon flight cycles. For these animations, I will be using the gifs in the previous post as reference for these flight cycles, much like how I did with the bat animations. One thing I noticed about the way how robins, crows and owls fly is that it is somewhat a progression of movement, with owls moving their wings the least and robins moving theirs the most. This progression will become more clear with the animations down below. 

To start off with, I animated the wing, just like with the bat like animation. This took a bit of tweaking to get how I want it to, it's still not 100% owl-like however, but it has become apparent that owls and dragons are not 100% the same either.

With both wings now flapping, it's really starting to come together. 

After the wings, I went about adding simple movements to the rest of the dragon, I wanted to keep this relatively simple due to a lot of birds, including owls, moving almost only their wings in flight.

I'm quite pleased with how the tail come out as well, in the Bat flight cycle, it seemed quite janky whereas this feels more natural.

Next, I will alter this animation to replicate how crows fly, which is not too different from owls.

The difference here is that the wing folds inwards when the wing is going upwards. However this simple difference creates a vast difference, personally I really like this one.

Here I've done the same but with a robin-esque flight, I'm not overly keen on this one at all, the wing movement is too quick, I had to use a playblast to be able to properly capture it rather than make a gif.

With this post, I would have accomplished the basics of what I set out to do with this project, analysing several different styles of flight from real animals and using those flight styles as reference for several different dragon flying cycles. 
In my next, and quite possibly final post, I shall be be doing an evaluation of this past project as well as posting a showreel of the work done.
However, before that post, I would like to attempt to do a ground movement cycle for the dragon, taking inspiration from the bat's weird and slightly creepy leaping jump movement.

Animating a Dragon ~ part five ~ research cont.

 In this blog post, I shall be continuing my research into how different animals fly so that I can use that as reference for animating a dragon.

This time, instead of a bat, I shall be analysing birds.

Before I begin, I would like to note that I expect different types of birds to fly differently, therefore I shall be researching different bird types, this mainly being something like a bird of prey along with a smaller bird like a Robin. I may also see how pigeons fly because pigeons are funny, however seagulls are the spawn of the devil. 

To start off with, I will be analysing how a barn owl flies, which is widely known to be a silent flyer, something that would be terrifying if a huge dragon was able to do the same.

Here we can see that when an owl flaps its wings, the wings first dip down, and then back up, with a bend in the middle with the rest of the wing following through on that movement. There is also a slight tilt with the wings as they reach their peak. The rest of the body has almost not movement however.

Albeit not a barn owl, this owl still flaps in a very similar way, we can see that the ends of the wings are slightly tilted upwards as well, this is something that is also replicated in the animation of Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon as can be seen in this gif from the previous post.

One thing that is common in a lot of birds of prey, including owls as you can see, is that a lot of time spent in the air is spent simply gliding, this is something I will have to take into account when animating a bird-like flight.

In this gif, we get a different angle on the barn owl's flight. This is useful to get different angles as we can better see how the wing moves forwards first, and then on it's way up, it arcs backwards.

Here we can see the iconic Robin, angling their body to intercept with the coconut, just magnificent. The robins movement is far more busy than the owls, when the wings are bought upwards, they also furl inwards. I imagine this is be more nimble against predators. This furling inwards of the wings would definitely be interesting to use on a dragon.

The crow flies in a somewhat of a halfway between a small bird like a robin and a large bird like an owl. It's wings take big movements, bending backwards only halfway down the wings.

Overall, all three of these birds have interesting and unique flight techniques, all of which would fit a dragon's flight I feel, in my next post, I shall be animating at least an owl-like flight, however due to that possibly having less going on than in the bat flight, I hope to also be able to do at least one more bird-like flight animation.