Whew. Animating stuff is difficult and apparently quite addictive!
It didn't leave me be, so I just had to add more and more frames to this. Until realizing that without proper planning, and trying to animate backwards really not the way such things should be done. Ever tried to expand an animation backwards in time?
Well, this started as an idea of just an ordinary digital image capturing a moment of an akri's takeoff. But it just kept nagging me, how it would actually look like?
The Akri (who has a nice reference sheet in my main gallery) is a dragon / wywern like creature of my sci-fi setting, one of the three Tani races.
This is not unlike some speculations about pterosaurs (you can easily find some searching for "quadrupedal launch"). The akri has somewhat similar build, the front, the head is significantly different, but from the point of launching and flying actually not that much (the akri bulk is mostly in a long, muscular neck while pterosaurs often carried ridiculously huge ornaments). The rear is heavier and stronger, but (I guess) the overall wing loading is just significantly higher for the akri.
Such a takeoff would be quite rough, if you happened to ride them, you could easily be thrown off or get injured!