Animals & Creatures - Session 201

After a VERY good and much needed break :), I'm ready and superexcited about diving into the second term of the Animals & Creatures Masterclass.

Again I've gotten a fantastic mentor, Keith Sintay, with over 17 years of experience, in both traditional and CG animation - and some really cool classmates that I already know I'm gonna learn tons from. This is gonna be pure awesomeness!

No relaxed first week this term. They're throwing us straight into a vanilla flight cycle with the new dragon rig. Even though it's a crazy cool rig - opening it for the first time with tons of controls and hardly ever animated anything flying at all - it's kind of scary.

I spent most of the week trying to wrap my head around the rig and figure out what controls that I'm most comfortable using etc. Also started to study tons of birds to get an idea of how this works.

Again, I have this really exciting/scary feeling of moving into a territory that's somewhat familiar in terms of animation, but totally new in terms of flying creatures and animal/bird behavior. It's a really really cool "I'm gonna learn a lot here"-feeling!

Here's the planning I did for this weeks assignment:

And here is the blocking pass of the vanilla flight cycle: