After reworking the dragon rig and some test flights I started doing the animation for actual shots from Ara’s Tale.
Its now the same with the dragon as it was with Ara in the first shots. I had to get familiar with the rig and methods to get the dragon flying. I am now back at 10+ hours per shot but getting better (I hope).
The rig is still not perfect but it will handle the shots I want to do. The only thing which sucks is the tongue rig. I implemented it as spline ik like the tail and neck but I ran into the problem that my tongue (and eye ) controllers didn’t hold their position relative to the dragons head and ended up in all the odd places during animation. Parenting (or any other related constraints) had me introduced a cyclic dependency again and was a big pain during animation, so I went back and implemented a very crude ik rig, which in the end will not survive to the end of the film …
I thought I show you two consecutive shots from the film to give an impression how the two main characters act together. These shots give nothing away, so I am fine with this. In the first shot the dragon is seen from above while rising from the abyss. This may be not clear because of the lack of texturing and thus perspective.
here we go
Let’s see how may shots there are to show here. There are quite a number to animate though …
