Dragon Animation

This is the short I did for the last quarter of my degree in character and creature animation. We had to make an animation of a dragon to show our knowledge about the mechanics of flying animals.

First I did an analysis of the largest flying birds such as eagles.

Then, I animated the flying cyle on side. This step also helped me test the rig and fix all the issues before starting to animate the final shots.

I did the Layout animating the main control of the rig, in this step, I was already trying to make the correct arcs and timing. With the studio library, I put the flight cycle that I did in a separate scene to fit the fins and animated from that base. For some shots I used a script to create a curve from the movement of the main control, then I parented the head, body, and hip to locators and tied them to the motion path. Once the head, body, and hip followed the same curve, I would bake the locators and animate them again to give it more noise and realism.

Finally, I exported all scenes to Unreal Engine and created the environment with Megascan's assets.