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.