Flight Cycle Animations

Flight Cycle Animations

Made em myself and oof I am exhausted. I had one animation class in college. Just the one. I can’t do much more than these short cycles (though I am working on some longer ones at the moment).

Disclaimer: these gifs are not a perfect reference for flight, I recommend looking up videos of birds and bats flying in slow motion for better references. These are just meant to be samples of how winged people would need to move their wings and whole bodies a lot more than we usually see in movies and tv. I figured it would work better as a visual in motion as well as a written description.

(Description: a bird winged person and bat winged person flying in a looped gif. They are shown from the side here, with their wing bones highlighted in red.)

It was hard to keep everything consistently sized, but anyway. Heads should stay pretty still, this is called “head tracking” and if a flying creature can’t do this they won’t be able to see straight while they fly. Hips should move a lot when flying, because tails are just as much a part of the motion as wings are. In the case of birds, their tails tend to move opposite to their wings, flaring outwards as well. In the case of bats, their wings are attached to their legs and tail if they have one, so their hips will follow the motion of the wings. (And with bat winged people it’s always a tail because the wing membrane would disrupt the bipedalism otherwise).

Bat wings usually have a deeper downstroke than bird wings, and their finger joints allow for more precise wing shaping in flight, curling upwards close to the body for the upstroke. Bird wings in casual flight will have shallower wing strokes than bat wings, sometimes not even coming all the way up depending on the flight speed. They also keep their wingtips closer to the body on the upstroke. Like how when you’re swimming it’s easier to pull your arm up elbow-first to avoid drag.

Definitely look up specific birds and bats in slow motion if you can, flying is a very complex and nuanced form of movement and I can’t describe every detail of it myself. Wing shape, flight speed, air currents, etc can all affect the way a creature flies.

(Description: same as above, but now the winged people are shown flying towards the viewer, and their wing bones are not highlighted.)

Honestly it’s a little easier to draw normal flight from the front lol it lets me show the movement of the wings better. (Foreshortening wings is freakin tricky and I’ve been working on that for years, it’s so much harder than foreshortening other limbs.) It’s a bit easier to see the bird tail motion here, the way it flares out when it dips down.

(Description: a looped gif of a bird winged person and a bat winged person hovering, shown from the side. There is also an example of how not to hover, depicted by a common trope of a winged person floating vertically in the air withheir wings held straight out to the side. Their body kind of bobs up and down while their wings move mainly from the shoulder, looking more like signal flags than actual flapping wings.)

Not all birds and bats can hover and it kind of requires extremely fast flapping, with a very particular motion to it which is hard to depict at any angle. But it’s okay to fudge that a little for the sake of your winged people. The motion is rather circular, wings go out to the side, push down, and then the wrist pushes forward. On the way back up, the wrist folds straight back and the whole wing will fold in super close to the body, then quickly rotate outwards to come back straight out behind the body and repeat. That’s how it works in the best videos of hovering birds I could find, which were kingfishers. I could not locate a video of a bat hovering that was quite as thorough but I gathered that it works in a very similar way.

Except hummingbirds, those are a whole category of their own. I might have to make a specific post on hummingbird wings someday because they are just that unique.

And as seen on the end there, my pet peeve. I see this in live action and cartoons. The weird vertical hover where the person just sorta floats there and moves their wings flatly up and down (or worse, they don’t move their wings at all). This is not a functional way to fly. The wings are not catching any air. They’re going to fall right out of the sky. And what is the point of giving a character wings as an actual body part if you’re just going to depict them magically floating? It’s not nearly as fun.