CGSociety has a great story on how DreamWorks brought both the Dragons and the Vikings to life in their recent hit “How To Train Your Dragon”.  Covering such details as dealing with the hairy vikings and  “How do you show an Emotion under a hair-covered Face?”, to rigging the face of a Dragon, they cover some great inside information.

To animate both the human character and dragon faces DreamWorks turned to its own in-house software appropriately named Rig. Though Rig works like Maya with many animation tools under the hood the DreamWorks Rig system written by Dick Walsh is based on human facial anatomy with variants so it can be used on something like dragon faces too. Rig didn’t drive the faces with blend shapes. The musculature underneath is fit to the design and uses hundreds of controls to feed the appropriate behaviors such as those for a smile. “We’ve done most facial blend shape animation and this kind of musculature based rigging and the later seemed to do a better job for how you got in to the targets. Blend shapes are great once you get to the target but the in-between seemed better when based on what the muscles underneath a real face would do.””

via CGSociety – How To Train Your Dragon.