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.