I will not struggling with creating my own character anymore, I used to do. Because I need to focus on animating not modeling. So I tried to find some free rigs first.
The first dragon rig I found is this one:
The next one is stone dragon:
The dragons that I chose are in a realistic style, it will look more oppressive in comparison with the cartoon style.
As for the selection of the characters, I have thought about it for a while. It depends on what kind of action that I want to make. My idea of the animation is a man fight with a dragon alone and the dragon will be hundreds of times bigger than this warrior. So I need this character to be agile with great reflexes and sharp attacks.
I think the game ‘Monster Hunter’ could be the great reference of my animation. There are various of weapons to against dragon on the game. I chose some light and agile weapons to watch their attack move and get some ideas.
In this video we can see the long sword has many actions to aviod the attack, it can even jumps or climb on the monster to the high and attack. It just like a Japanese katana but bigger.
The dual blades has the highest agility, it has a Demon mode which can let the character moves very fast than the normal mode. And its Flurry Rush can spin around to close the enemy, aviod attack and even jump on the enemy and attack enemy’s backside.
Then I have looked for some rigs from the online resourse tried to find a best character to macth my ideas.
These thre eare the good characters, they had sowrd or dual blades, and their body all look like the agile type. But they are quite stylised.
Then I found these two samurais. The mechanical samurai are in very good design, but I think this style are not quite fit my animation, it should be in the high technical world in the future. But this samurai girl is perfect, the whole design are amazing. Her body shape is like a normal human body, and the red infected parts can show some relation with the dragon on the fantacy world.
This rig is created by Kiel Figgins and I bought this rig on his website.The modeling, rigging and the textures looks perfect. And she has dual katana and can be desgined some very fast and cool attack move.
The next step is looking for the landscape. I found it very quickly. It’s call The Ghost Town.
It is a flat land with some hills surround, and there are some small houses in the middle. I was thinking the story of a dragon attacks the small town and the samurai fight with it. But then I realised if they fight, all the buildings will be smashed. And simulating the broken buildinngs will be a long process and I cant focus on the animation. Therefore, I removed all the buildings but tried to keep the plants on the ground.
After selecting all the elements I need, the last step is find some references of the dragon animation and the character attack animation.
Nergigante is the most brutal dragon in the game, it has only physical attack. The video below is the attack moves.
Fatalis is the final boss of the game, its attack is firing. Also and see the roaring and flying movement in the video.
My favorite game animation showreel, there are many katana attack scenes in it.
David Vince’s demo reel, including many creature animations.
The last one is the dragon boss fight in God Of War 4, a man fights with a huge dragon. it has the gameplay and the CG scene just like watching a movie.
Finally I found the references that I need, I can start to think about the storyline.