I started by gathering a wide range of lion references and studying their behaviour, body movement, and, most importantly, posing. Throughout the process, I learned how crucial strong posing is, as lions can easily start to look like bears when their defining shapes and silhouettes are lost.

During production, I experimented with Daniel Fotheringham’s quadruped animation approach. This workflow begins by animating the body as a single mass before gradually refining the upper body, front legs, hind legs, and hips. The approach uses layering and offset techniques, which helped me work more efficiently and refine the motion step by step. More details on this method can be found here: https://danielfotheringham.com/quad-blog-beta/

To better analyse the motion, I parented a ball to both the hips and chest to isolate and check their movement. Once the overall body motion was established, I used animation layers to refine the posing, making sure the body length stayed consistent throughout the animation. I finished the process by animating the tail.