Anyway, nothing special, but thanks to the great folks at BlenderCookie for teaching me pretty much everything I know. The model needs a serious retexturing (as I was in a rush to try animating it) and unfortunately the torso isn’t rigged to be more flexible but the rig was 133 bones in total and I’m not redoing it just to add a little more torso movement.
Don’t be concerned with making stuff that is “special”, keep at what you are doing because you are doing it well.
One critique is the upswing of the wings. The way they are now, the wings would push the creature down as they move up. Tuck the wings in against the body, or angle them so they slice through the air with minimal resistance on their way up, and then the wings are only fully extended out flat when they are pushing down against the air.
Yeah, I was feeling they were more stiff than I’d like but I was also kind of scared of curving them too much while he’s “holding still” with his wings at almost 45 degrees and was going to exaggerate the curve a lot more when he was holding his wings horizontal - in retrospect I think you’re right that the curve is better - thank you for your nice words.