Bird animation

A long while back when I was doing some research on rigging bird wings and bird flight animation, to see what kind of movements would be required. While I was doing that I found Brendan Body's blog where he shows his personal work, tutorials and other stuff. His documentation on bird flight is a true goldmine for bird animation!
Recently a friend of mine started working on an animation for a dragon and found him in the need of more reference material. I tried looking up the goldmine, but had a hard time of it! Soooo this post is a combination of sharing this brilliant piece of information, aaaand to be sure that I never lose it again..

Brendan Body is an animator who worked on the movie Legend of the Guardians, a movie featuring owls (and other birds... I think), so he surely has the authority to speak on the subject of bird animation! I recommend seeing the movie too, the visual quality and animation is mindblowing, even after 2 years.

So without further ado, here is the collection of information on bird animation from Brendan Body, dig in!


Tips and observations of bird flight:
http://www.brendanbody.co.uk/flight_tutorial/index.html


Bird Flight Tutorial:
http://brendanbody.blogspot.com/2010/09/bird-flight-tutorial.html

Examples of his bird animations:
http://brendanbody.blogspot.com/2011/04/guardians-flight.html