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.