Unit Six & Bird in Flight
Updated: May 10
1st of March 2026
In this lesson, I have the opportunity to explore avian animation and the principles of bird locomotion. During my research, I hope to get a better understanding of what governs bird flight. The project will provide a good foundation for other winged fantasy creatures.
Starting my work, I will have to look at live action references. Eadweard Muybridge's bird flight studies are a great resource for this kind of work. His pictures are very helpful for observation and also give very good guidance to achieve realistic poses. I am also required to study bird anatomy and flight mechanics to improve my animation work.
In this project, I will animate a crow in flight. The suggested rig, unfortunately, wasn't available anymore, so I downloaded the Vail crow rig by Dimi Devos from Turbosquid. This isn't a free rig, but I couldn't find a free one that would be suitable for my work. The rig is great though and has lots easy to use controls, so it will be great for future use too.
Once the bird flight is done, I will download and import a set to create a little story, and I will also learn to use the CV curve tool to create a flight path for my crow.
The animation will be a 12-frame-long slow flap cycle. The first thing I have to do is to move the crow into the first main position, moving both wings upward. Frames 1 and 13 are identical. So I dragged & dropped frame 1 to 13 and pressed 'S' to set the key. This was followed by frame 7, which was about halfway through the cycle. Once these first key frames are set, I already have a basic flapping cycle.
The next step is to set the in-betweens to give more flexibility to the movement. Following my research into aerodynamic principles, birds' wingtips' curl during their flapping. The currently known reasons for this are the feathers' flexibility, manoeuvring, and control. Following this information, I will added a curl to the wings at frames 3, 5, 7, 9 & 11 by selecting the controls closer to the tips. As the wings are going down at frames 3, 5 & 7, I will curl the tips up. When the wings are coming up at frames 9 & 11, I will curl the tips down. At this point, the bird has much more flexibility.
"Wings deflect air downward (downwash), causing an equal and opposite upward reaction, creating lift" (Newton, 1687), whereby my next job was to add movement to the crow's body.
I selected the rig's body control and set its position at frames 1 & 13, and then at frame 7 i moved it a bit higher. Testing it, I realized there was too much movement, so I adjusted it by amending the Translate Y curve in the graph editor. The motion was improving, but I still needed to add motion to the tail. The tail had to oppose the body's movement. When the body was down at frames 1 &13, the tail went up, and when the body moved up at frame 7, the tail went down. At this point, the tail and the body moved in sync, so I needed to offset the tail movement by selecting Rotate X in the graph editor and moving it two frames to the left.
Following this, I already had a more realistic motion, and only small refinements were needed by editing the head and leg movements. I started with the head and applied the same steps as with the tail. I had to set its main position at frames 1 & 13, and rotate it slightly down at frame 7. Here again, I had to offset the curve by two frames to the left, so the head and the body are not in a synchronised motion. It is very important to mention that before I moved the curves, the Post- and Pre Infinity cycles need to be turned on. Once the head was done too, I carried on with the legs. I set the key frames at 1 & 13, and at frame 7, when the body was up, I moved the foot slightly lower. Then I selected all the curves in the graph editor, turned on the Infinity curves, and by selecting the translate Y curve, I offset the leg's movement by two frames to the left. After this, I did the same to the other leg; however, this time I offset it by three frames so the two of them are not in sync.
At this point, I was quite happy with the motion, so it was time to bring in a set and add a Motion path to the crow.
I downloaded a nice chapel set with graves from Turbosquid, created by Gerzi 3D Art.
First, I imported the set, scaled and moved it into my imagined position. There was a bit of difficulty when tried to move the grave stones as the whole set was one piece of geometry. In order to separate them, I had to select the set and go to the Modelling menu > Mesh > Separate. Once the different objects are separated, I could go ahead and multiply (cmd + D) and move any of them.
My idea of the scene was that the crow should fly towards the chapel, rising and making a turn around its tower. At this stage, I also had to consider my camera view, so I created a camera and set its view. It is advised to lock the Camera once we are happy with its angle, as I made the mistake several times using the camera window and amending my camera view by mistake.
Once I did that, I moved the crow into its start-out position and carried on with the motion path. To create a motion path, I went to the Animation menu > Create > Curve tools > CV Curve Tool, and started clicking around the chapel, creating a swirling path. This was easier to be done in the orthographic top view. Once the swirl is done, I went back to the perspective view, clicked on the path with the move tool (W) and started to adjust the path with the move (W) and curve (E) tools. Then I changed to Control Vertex mode and started to further adjust the path to make it more realistic for the crow's flight. When I was happy with my path, it was time to attach the crow to it. Before I did that, I quickly had to add more frames to my animation, as currently I had only 13 frames. As I was planning to add more crows to the scene, I set my frames to 340 (about 14 seconds) long. Then I selected both the path and the crow, selected Constrain (in the Animation menu) > Motion Paths > Attach to Motion Path > click on the option box. In the options box I reseted everything, selected the Time range of Start/End, and Z for the Front axis, Up axis Y, added Bank, and attached them. The next step was to animate the camera. Later, I had to further adjust my camera view as the base of my set was still visible.
My next job was to bring more crows to the scene. I duplicated the path (Ctrl + D) and moved it where I wanted it, and then imported the final crow flapping animation again. I went through the same process as with the first one; however, in the motion Path's option box, I offset the Start/End option by about 8 frames so the second crow would fly into the scene shortly after the first one. I repeated this process again with the third crow, and then went ahead to add further props to my scene.
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