Dragon animation

The dragon animation! This is the bit that I was dreading the most... and my previous plan to rig the model has failed... So, I have resorted to manually manipulating the model, which is actually not too bad and has produced a good animation so far.

I have been using key frames and manually manipulating the dragon for each "shot" of the sequence, relating to the three main matt paintings that I have already done.

One of the drawbacks of how my dragon is textured means that when I render the animated sequence as a .png showing only the dragon, a white border is present around the dragon at all times, as shown in the shot below:

After numerous attempts and research into getting rid of this white border, I resorted to having to render the dragon animation with the background. To do this I will have to set the environment background to the appropriate matt painting with each animation.

This will resolve the white border issue but will also take almost twice as long, just over 4 hours for just the first shot.... however, because I have done this in good time I feel confident that this will not be a draw back and will be successful.

I now just have to wait for all of my animations to render so that I can take the shots into After Effects for the compositing and editing process to begin.