Ideation 2

After a few days of looking around on the internet for inspiration, I came across a really nice animation showreel for a fantasy game, Guild wars 2: Path of Fire.

The showreel features a few animations of a raptor being ridden by a man. This seems like a really cool idea that could improve my locomotion and weight transfer skills with not only a creature but also a person interacting with it. Its a challenging animation to do as a raptor doesn't really have any obvious animals to gather reference from but i'm up for the challenge as its something I would really like to do and I think it would look very cool as an addition to my showreel.

After looking around at available creature rigs online, I found the above rig on Manoanim. Testing some basic poses with the rig helps to confirm that it works and that the skin weighting is reliable.

With the rig tests done (not sure if the above is it happy or dead), its time to find our character.

After sitting the Azri rig from Game Anim atop the creature I now need to specify what animations I'm planning on making them do; Idle, idle 2 (Twitch), idle 3 (Stroking creature), walk, run, death, jump up to ledge and kill a person.