*Jaemin dragon is a free rig made by Truong CG artist
For our final project during my 3D animation and visual effects class, we had the chance to learn on how to animate a creature. With everything happening globaly we ended the class online and we couldn't do everything we were suppose to do and learn because we didn't have enough time. By the end of the semester we didn't even need to work on this project but I decided to do this project instead because I really wanted to retry animating a dragon!
Before this class I had only animated a dragon once. I was asked to animate a dragon for my secondary high school's musical. I didn't know anything about animating a dragon and I was not satisfied with the result from back then (I did it 3 years ago) but I had a lot of fun doing it even so. The first thing we did for this part of class was to get used to the rig so our teacher asked us to find 2 poses to recreate with the rig.
Our teacher gave us a live footage sequence to animate the dragon in and gave us a week to do our blocking. I decided to make the dragon jump/fly on the building and make him roar and glare a bit. I was happy with the result back when I was working on it and I really had fun reusing the same dragon rig again!
After sending our blockings of the dragon, our teacher gave us some notes on shotgun and we could then work on or polish version of the project, we only had a week left of university so we couldn't do a lot of polished versions for class. After sending my '' final version'' the teacher was happy with the result and gave me some notes for if I wanted to keep working on it during the summer which I really wanted to do, so I could improve my animation as much as I could and at the same time improve my skills and knowledge about creature animation. During this part I worked a lot on the Jumping/flying part and the mouvement of the tail.
During the summer while working on another project, I kept working on the animation of this one. I reworked on the majority of the animation, especially the left arm of the dragon because it felt weird a little, the body and the tail. There are still things that are not working in this version that I will be able to correct and improve in my next update.
Here is the final version of this shot. I reworked/polished many parts of the animation and re-animated the tail . After modifying a lot of stuff the tail was clipping in the house, a lot. So I decided to rework on it and simplify the animation using an animation layer. It took me longer to finish this part since I had started my last year of university by then, but I was able to finish it by working on it after class and during my reading week in october. I had a lot of fun challenging myself with this project and I am happy to have been able to finish it before the end of my school semester. It really helped me improve my skills for the better. I can't wait to start a new project to keep improving and learn new things!
